Search - Vincent Crane :: Close Your Eyes: A Collection 1965-1986

An Underrated Musician With An Inconsistent Career

Chris Frohring | Cleveland, OH USA | 08/21/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

""Close Your Eyes" is a great overview of the career of Vincent Crane, tracing his history from his beginnings with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown to his unexpected membership in Dexys Midnight Runners. Crane was one of a handful of British Hammond organ innovators from the late 60's. In Atomic Rooster, he helped to pioneer heavy metal, hard rock and "heavy soul". His best tunes are hook-filled and aggressive (such as his top 20 hit, "Tomorrow Night"), or melancholy and plaintive (the instrumental "Moods" is incredible). However, his career was dogged by his bipolar disorder and his tendency to fire band members at the wrong time (John DuCann, author of "Devil's Answer", which is not available here). The track selection is very representative of his career and disc 2 is a nice grab-bag of rarities, but one can't help feel that Atomic Rooster could've been a real contender if some benevolent force could've censured Vince when he was getting restless. Still, it is a credit to Vince that, despite all of the line-up changes in Rooster, they were still indentifiable due to his inimitable writing style.



This is recommended to those who want to get to know Vincent Crane the musician and human being. If one is looking for a definitive Atomic Rooster collection, one needs to find a disc with "Devil's Answer", as John DuCann and Vincent Crane together could've taken Atomic Rooster to great heights. They balanced each other extremely well - see "Death Walks Behind You", the most appealing Atomic Rooster album."

Long Overdue and Well Done

Kevin Kissell | Somewhere in France | 09/14/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Vincent Crane's best work was with his band Atomic Rooster, and the first disk in this 2-disk set is consecrated to material from the groups first 5 albums. Rather than a classic "best of" selection, the material was clearly chosen to highlight Crane's compositions and playing. The choices are mostly very good - there was a lot of good material to choose from. The weakest song is "Banstead", which is presumably included because it refers to the mental hospital where Crane was incarcerated following the first of several breakdowns brought on by the manic/depression that eventually drove him to suicide.



The second disk is the "rarities" disk, material Crane recorded with other groups and with the short-lived reunion of Atomic Rooster in the 1980's. Some of it is very rare but, frankly, pretty average, but the whole thing saved by the selections from Taro Rota, which was a long composition - I suppose you could call it a jazz suite - that Crane wrote with the intention of recording it with Arthur Brown and a band. All that came out of the project was a 10m demo excerpt recorded with Brown and other musicians, and a full-length recording of Crane on piano and vocals. Here we get the full demo (to the best of my knowledge, the first time it's been released) and a section from the solo version.



Given the unevenness of Disc 2, I hesitated to give the compilation five stars. But a Crane compilation like this has been long overdue, and this one was put together with remarkable care."