Search - Jon Jenkins, Paul Lackey :: Continuum

Keyboardists Jon Jenkins and Paul Lackey come from the Vangelis school of orchestral synthesis. Their music on this 1995 CD shows two musicians trying to find a voice in a genre rife with pretension. They don't succeed. Fond of overblown strings and bombastic percussion, Jenkins and Lackey are seduced by their sounds, which are impressive when you're in a studio and the speakers and headphones make you feel as if you have a cosmic orchestra blasting at your fingertips. But in the cold light of day, their orchestra is stiff-fingered; the lines they may have thought were highly nuanced instead sound as if they came from plastic injection molds. There are a few artists, Vangelis and Richard Burmer among them, who successfully craft their own orchestras, but except for the sweeping expanses of "The Vision," with its rotating sequencer pattern and crescendoing orchestration, Jenkins and Lackey are strictly off the rack. Continuum is not without skill, and Jenkins emerges with a more original voice on his solo album, Flow. --John Diliberto