Annie Haslam Blessing In Disguise CD

All songs written or co-written by Thatcher except "Prologue" (Dunford) and "Rajah Khan" (Dunford).

The first album by the '70s (i.e. Annie Haslam) version of Renaissance is a transitional work, rooted in more standard hard rock sounds (including psychedelia) than what followed. One can spot the difference, which may please some listeners and put others off, in the fairly heavy guitar sound of "Prologue," Rob Hendry's electric instrument playing both lead and rhythm parts prominently at various times behind Annie Haslam's soaring vocals and adjacent to John Tout's piano. "Kiev" may also startle some longtime fans, since Haslam doesn't handle the lead vocals, the male members' singing being much more prominent. The ethereal, flowingly lyrical "Sounds of the Sea" is the cut here that most resembles the music that the group became known for in the years ahead, and shows Haslam singing in the high register for which she would become famous. "Spare Some Love," with its prominent folky acoustic guitar, also anticipates material (specifically "Let It Grow" and "On The Frontier") off of the group's better known second album, Ashes Are Burning. "Bound For Infinity" marked the final creative contribution by co-founder Jim McCarty, of the '60s version of Renaissance, and is pretty enough even if it doesn't fit in anywhere with their subsequent sound. And the 11-minute epic "Rajah Khan," with its elements of raga-rock, including sitar-like passages on Hendry's electric guitars and an extended VCS 3 synthesizer solo by Francis Monkman, is a more advanced and virtuoso descendant of late '60s psychedelia. It, too, has little to do with the sound that the group subsequently adopted (although it does intersect, in the most peripheral way, with "Song of Scheherazade" and some of the other Eastern-theme works that preceded it), but the track is entertaining and does show off a startlingly different type of art-rock toward which this group could have gravitated. The sound is clean, and this version of Prologue is to be preferred over Capitol's abortive attempt to reissue it in the late 1980's as In The Beginning, which cut some of the material and had totally lackluster sound. ~ Bruce Eder

The release of this album and its predecessor, Annie Haslam's Renaissance, began the phenomenon of "dueling Renaissances" that took place in the 1990s, Michael Dunford having started his own version of the group, and the surviving members of the original line-up also claiming the name -- all astonishing for a band that seldom, if ever, charted any records in any notable way, and also unfortunate, because it diverted attention from each artist's work. Blessing in Disguise is one of Haslam's most engaging and accessible records -- all of it is on the arty, romantic side of pop/rock, in a similar vein to Renaissance, but it's also distinctly different, in that the singer sacrifices some of her voice's crystalline purity and a little bit of her range in favor of a warmer, more expressive sound. Haslam also co-authored much of the material here, which may account for the slightly higher degree of emotional expressiveness on the album, although two of her three very best performances are on songs that she didn't co-write, "Love Lies, Love Dies" (co-written by Betty Newsinger [nee Betty Thatcher] and her ex-Renaissance bandmate Michael Dunford) and Ezra Mohawk's and Alan Chapman's "Can't Turn the Light Off"; the third, "Whisper From Marseilles (For Julien)," is a musical/dramatic tour de force for the singer. Little here is far off from the standard set by those three jewels, however, and the whole album marks a definite advancement from Haslam's earlier work -- instead of "

Additional Tracks

Recorded at Nova Sound Studios, London, England from June to July, 1972.

Renaissance: Annie Haslam (vocals, percussion), Rob Hendry (guitar, mandolin, chimes, vocals), John Tout (keyboards, vocals), Francis Monkman (synthesizer), John Camp (bass, tampoura, vocals), Terry Sul