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OREGON
NICE BEAVER
2004 , HOLLAND - EURO 15.00
Label: CYCLOPS
ALBUM REVIEW
Oregon is Nice Beaver’s new and second studio album. The inventive songs with catchy choruses are still there, but the longer (mostly over 10 minute) tracks give the band more space for their instrumental passages to develop their fine keyboard and guitar work. Hans Gerritse seems to have listened to his Camel albums recently as his guitar solos are certainly in the Andy Latimer spirit. Not quite a concept-album, “Oregon” has a series of themes, ideas and subjects involving dreams in the broadest sense: nightmares, dream women, the dream as an ideal, the defence mechanism that helps people to witness horrible events in a dreamlike state, the dream as a fantasy, the dream as a sanctuary or quite literally the process of dreaming. Title track “Oregon” is exemplary: Oregon was the first destination of the American Gold Rush, this beautiful promised land that could only be reached after travelling the Rocky Mountains and enduring the most gruesome conditions. This image becomes the metaphor for a young rock band’s aspirations and the troubles they encounter along the way. Also, Oregon is nicknamed The Beaver State. The final song Lawn Mower’s Day Off introduces a theme and melody before great interplay between acoustic guitar/cor anglais/piano and electric guitar develop the theme to finish off this fine album. (Cyclops)
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