#focus iii

[theidiotbastardson-blog]

Visit Original Link

Focus - Sylvia

[silmarildust]

it's like holy shit guitarist from Focus, just go the fuck off with your Dutch guitar style dude, god damn.

[progexpress]

Focus,a dutch progressive rock band

This track is probably my favorite song by them (or Harem Scarem) The dynamic Volume, the rising power, the smooth guitar work Layed down perfectly by Jan Akkerman. Tis beautiful.

[villa-strangiato]

One album a day

#9 Focus III - Focus

1- Round Goes The Gossip

2- Love Remembered

3- Sylvia

4- Carnival Fugue

5- Focus III

6- Answers? Questions! Questions? Answers!

7- Anonymus II

8- Elspeth Of Nottingham

http://youtu.be/Wx7NuLQsNHc

[ravensbluff-blog]

Have You Heard? - Focus (Forgotten Gods of Prog Edition)

Instrumentals are fickle things. If done well, they are beautiful, a soothing and clever way to flex one’s creative muscles and tell a story without words (a true challenge!). When done poorly, they come across as trite, repetitive, or incomplete. There is very little middle ground between these two extremes, which is why instrumental tracks contribute to the very best and very worst of Prog music. However, since Have You Heard? (unlike my weekly reviews) is characteristically a positive column, I bring up instrumentals not to show off the worst ones, but to discuss a band that writes great ones.

Enter Focus, a Dutch Progressive Rock band best known in the states for “that one song with the yodeling”, specialized in instrumental tracks like “Sylvia”, “Love Remembered” and “Hocus Pocus” (the aforementioned yodeling piece). Built upon the creative energies of keyboardist/flautist Thijs Van Leer and guitarist Jan Akkerman, Focus’ work draws inspiration from Medieval Folk music, early Jazz, hard Rock, and Classical compositions. In short, it’s very stereotypical Prog. At length, it’s stereotypical Prog with one important characteristic separating it from all the other bands I’ve discussed this month: lyrics.

As you may have guessed (being the clever reader you are, reading all my introduction about instrumentals above), Focus largely eschews the traditional attitude towards vocals in favor of either nonsensical, voice-as-an-instrument freeform singing or removing the human voice from the song entirely. Most of the songs from my two favorite albums by the band, Focus II: Moving Waves and Focus III, feature either small, repeated snippets of singing (in the case of “Round Goes the Gossip”, it’s just the song title) or free-form vocal solos (such as the yodeling in “Hocus Pocus”, which is really the only time yodeling has ever not turned an otherwise good song into farce).

Focus enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the US with their 2nd and 3rd albums (Moving Waves and Focus III) before a period of creative stagnation culminating in a departure for disco resulted in the band more or less imploding by 1976. Moving Waves is the more rock-influenced record, containing the seminal “Hocus Pocus” as well as the massive 23 minute epic “Eruption”, a track retelling the story of Orpheus through keyboard/guitar compositions. But Moving Waves suffered from pretty serious shifts in tone- “Hocus Pocus”, the album opener, was written by guitarist Jan Akkerman, while every other track was written by Thijs Van Leer, the keyboardist/flautist, which resulted in a sudden departure from the rock introduction Akkerman wrote to a series of more reserved, classical and jazzy keyboard/flute heavy songs.

It is in this regard that Focus III outperforms Moving Waves, being consistently written by Van Leer and working Akkerman’s very distinctive guitar tone (a dynamic, fluid guitar style coated in a thick, high-mids layer of distortion) into the otherwise very light keyboard work. Make no mistake, Van Leer is an incredibly talented keyboardist, and he brought his A-game to Focus III, which has both “Sylvia”, the more mature and better composed version of “Hocus Pocus” and “Love Remembered”, which has a keyboard tone that went on to inspire quirky romance movie scores for the next thirty years.

If you can find it, listen to Focus’ early albums and enjoy being able to just let the music flow over you, no lyrical message trying to make itself heard while you swim through the guitar solos and keyboard riffs. Because sometimes, the best way to listen to music is unquestioningly and unconsciously, without any thoughts in your mind.