8 August : A Question of Balance

The other notable album released on 7 August 1970 was The Moody Blues’ A Question of Balance.

I feel I have to give this some time since the Moodies are a name band who still have their admirers. A friend on Twitter called this, and all of their albums, ‘essential.’ I regret that I have to disagree.

This is a set of pedestrian songs tarted up with orchestrations and good musicianship (John Lodge’s bass is excellent throughout). The lyrics aspire to hippy-shit philosophy, but don’t attain even those heights.

This is quite clearly a group of talented musicians, but the urge for songs of significance generates a kind of recursive sabotage effect. They never take any risks and therefore never offer anything especially new. The reason Christopher Guest and co. could do such spot on pastiches of bad music is that they had material like this to draw on.

It’s Up To You is vaguely reminiscent of Jefferson Airplane and there are hints they’ve been listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash; that’s all well and good, but my notes as the album progresses read ‘God, this is tedious’ and ‘Getting worse.’

Is it all bad? No. The single from the album, and the opening track, Question is really quite good. The rest is like Roger Whittaker with a mellotron, except Roger had better material. I turned it off before the end of the last ‘song’.

If you really feel you have to, you’ll find it on Spotify (where I listened) and YouTube.