Album Review - Dream Beautiful - Blossomhead - MP3 downloads samplers

Greg Reid Album Review: Blossomhead - Dream Beautiful

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Earlier this year Blossomhead completed his fantasmogoric album called Dream Beautiful. It was the result of many years of surviving and investment.

This is a review of the album by local music mag aficianado, Clip Tickles. He’s pretty eccentric so look out for it!

What style would you describe your music as?

“If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that question, well I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this, I’d probably be on a beautiful, tropical island watching mermaids at play with the dolphins and whales while the mermen flap by trying to intimidate and impress me with their huge muscles……?”

Uh, sorry bout that’

It’s a tough question to ask a musician especially one like Blossomhead who has created an album that defies the boundaries of that question. I, like many, have tried to classify, file, index, codify, compartmentalize, box, label, typecast, pigeon hole and label the songs from the album DREAM BEAUTIFUL and like everyone else, I have failed to come up with just one place to stuff them into.DREAM BEAUTIFUL is an album of individual songs and one very interesting album of quality that goes beyond the description of one particular genre.

It is an album that lives somewhere else, on some other planet, in some other solar system not because the music is too weird or too strange but because it is unlike any other album I have ever heard before.

For a start it was recorded over seven years by two friends Greg Reid and Herrin Larkan who, it has been noted, the words creative, genius and maniacal commitment would suit very well. Despite many setbacks and adversity in both of their lives they continued to hold on to the dream of actually finishing the bloody thing, much to the disbelief of many people of little faith.

It is the only debut album I know of that has 24 songs laid out on the table for the listener to enjoy, so you’re sure to find at least one song that will grab you and not let go. 24 to1, now that’s pretty good odds.

As far as the songs themselves go, well lets just say that once you listen to them they’ll keep on dancing around in your mind long after they’ve actually stopped playing. Not in a maddening, “get out of my head before I go insane” kind of way, but more a “lets play that one more time” again and again kind of way.

I have heard many songs with great music and crap lyrics and I have heard many songs with great lyrics and crap music but it’s not often you hear an album of songs that have both great music and great lyrics such as you will hear on DREAM BEAUTIFUL.

Apart from the lyrics for “Cassandra” and “Alan’s Song” the songs were written by Greg Reid a musician with a talent for writing lyrics that reflect feelings we all experience as the complex, beautiful beings we are.

The lyrics for Cassandra were found in a children’s book called “The Lions Cavalcade” created by the eccentric and very talented English artist Alan Aldridge who in 1966 became the Art Director for Penguin Books and then became friendly with John Lennon and the other Beatles who asked him to became Visual Consultant to Apple, the company set up by the Beatles to help other creative artists.

He is an artist very much in demand for album covers and book covers but perhaps his most well know work is the wonderful Butterfly Ball.After a few roads that led to nowhere, Greg finally contacted Alan asking for permission to use the lyrics from Cassandra to which Alan agreed, thankfully.

I would place Cassandra as one of the strongest and more unusual songs from the album where the lyrics and music from two different artists unknown to each other at the time, have come together to compliment each other in a rather beautiful and artistic way.

I have visited the Blossomhead website http://www.blossomhead.com and although it is still being added to, I found it most welcoming and informative about the artist and some of the songs in general. All of the lyrics for the songs can be found there as well as brief background of the artist who I have come to admire for not only his creativity but also for the tenacity he has shown in completing such a monumental album.

Praise must also go to Herrin Larkan whose support, musicianship and engineering experience was a major factor in the album finally being completed in the form that it now is.

I encourage you the listener, to wrap your ears around this album as you visit the wonderfully strange world that can only be found in the mind of such an artist as BLOSSOMHEAD.

When I asked the meaning of the word Blossomhead, I was told that it meant “anyone who has a mind full of creative ideas that continually blossom out of the inner world to put colour and meaning into the more mundane world that is often described as reality”.

In the words of Blossomhead himself, “Some people don’t remember their dreams, some want to forget and some just Dream Beautiful”