by Cheryl Gunn
Earthtone Records
The last Cheryl Gunn album I heard, Vanity Of Venus, was pretty, but in a sense, pretty uneventful. In The Sun At Midnight, she takes a giant leap forward. My scientific hallmark of a good album is if I can answer yes to the question "Can I stand to listen to this over and over," and with this one, she clocks in with a pretty definite yes. It leaps out of the realm of background music into something that can capture your emotion and your imagination, often with an evocative cinematic feel that lets you create your own drama underneath it.
This is instrumental music, more or less New Age if you have to call it something; and features some strong melodies, diverse arrangements (it's not the same song recycled 12 times), and all in all it's a lot more individualistic and adventurous than her earlier effort. On the whole, I think the better tracks are near the beginning of the disc, but it all stacks up as pretty listenable. The influence of her husband Nicholas, himself quite a notable musician, is felt in an odd sort of way (don't shoot me for this) the music sounds a lot more "masculine" than her last album.
My faves are "Venus Over Skye," which features Nicholas Gunn on flute in a soaring almost pop-song like melody; this track goes uninterrupted into "Au Pair Au Bellum," a stern march with plodding percussion, like an army marching through the mud on the way to war, and what sounds like bagpipes and chimes taking the lead. With all the sampling these days, one doesn't always know if one's getting the real thing. Track five, "Beyond The Blue," has a hypnotic syncopated beat behind it that almost takes a life of its own under the gently shifting chords.
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