Captain Beyond - Captain Beyond

Captain Beyond
Captain Beyond

Capricorn, 1972

Rod Evans - vocals, percussion
Larry "Rhino" Reinhardt - guitars, backing vocals
Lee Dorman - bass guitar, keyboards, backing vocals
Bobby Caldwell - drums, percussion, vocals

1. Dancing Madly Backwards (On a Sea of Air)
2. Armworth
3. Myopic Voic
4. Mesmerization Eclipse
5. Raging River of Fear
6. Thousand Days of Yesterday (Intro)
7. Frozen Over
8. Thousand Days of Yesterday (Time Since Come and Gone)
9. I Can't Feel Nothin' (Part 1)
10. As The Moon Speaks (To The Waves of the Sea)
11. Astral Lady
12. As The Moon Speaks (Return)
13. I Can't Feel Nothin' (Part 2)

Captin Beyond may be one of the most obscure bands of the 70's, but the bands that their members came from certainly weren't. Evans was the original vocalist for Deep Purple (the one that sang on Hush), Reinhardt and Dorman were from Iron Butterfly, and Caldwell played with Johnny Winter. Some call them prog-rock, some call them space-rock, some compare them to the Allman Brothers. But no matter what you call them, they were a talented band, despite their lack of commerical success.

Many of the songs on this album actually merge together to create longer songs. The first set is Dancing Madly Backwards / Armworth / Myopic Void. The songs are full of heavy riffs and odd time signatures, and finishes with a section featuring several guitars with delay, slide, and wah applied to them. The effect is otherworldly, and gives you the feeling of floating into space or into a vision. Mesmerization Eclipspe and Raging River of Fear each stand alone, and both are excellent rockers. The next epic is Thousand Days of Yesterday / Frozen Over / Thousand Days of Yesterday. It starts off with another etheral guitar-based track before launching into two rockers, with similar lyrics to tie them together. The album's finale is I Can't Feel Nothin' / As The Moon Speaks / Astral Lady / As The Moon Speaks / I Can't Feel Nothin'. (I certainly hope they had some other way of naming these songs when they did them live...) Bookended by some of the best rocking tracks on the album, the poetic middle sections compliment it nicely, and the jam in the middle is another great track.

Any fan of the rock of this era, progressive rock, or proto-prog should check this out. These are a excellent musicians performing some amazing songs. I can think of no reason for their failure, other than they were perhaps ahead of their time. Three or four years later, Rush would fuse progressive excess with bluesy hard rock and strike it big.