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comes back to destroy its creator. However just when you thought that everything was going to be alright, "Black Rain" takes us back to a mainstream rock place. By now its obvious that we have sadly left the Celtic fringe far behind and the band seem content to play at being Pat Benatar, which is OK if you are Pat Benatar, but when you are Mostly Autumn is a real shame. Like most of what has gone before there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the song it just seems that they are content to coast along using 25% of their talent.

More in your face rock in the form of "Coming To" but this time it sounds a lot more original thanks to Iain Jennings but at only two and bit minutes you have got to ask yourself why its on the album. In the past small musical passages seemed to combine to form much bigger pieces of music, the sounds would flow and evolve from one theme or idea to another. "Coming To" just seems to sit there on its own a disembodied idea with nowhere to fit in.

Josh's vocals sound gruff almost like Bob Geldolf with out the accent on the opening passages of "Candle to the Sky" the music opens up and that old "Dark Side of the Moon" comparison becomes so obvious its embarrassing. A good song with some nice musical tricks but too derivative of another band and another time. The play out section and the vocal arrangements are fairly original, the later being almost Beatle-esque but that's not enough to rescue it from the Pink place, as it where. The piano and Uilleann pipes join forces in a riff reminiscent of times gone past on "Carpe Diem" setting the platform for Heather Findlay's voice which here sounds the finest on the whole album. The swirling mists of musical creation are reminiscent of Celtus in their ethereal and mood setting manner. The song takes its time to build, there is no rushing into things, something that other songs found here are guilty of and by the time the guitar joins the song and Findlay's voice rises high above the music recent musical misdemeanours have been temporarily forgotten. At over seven minutes they have remembered some of the lessons of the past and given us the long slow burning passion and skill of their earlier albums.

The title track starts in a similarly promising way, a delay affected acoustic guitar builds layers of rhythm onto which layers of female vocal are layered whilst keyboard and guitar slowly raise the dynamic of the piece before it drops back into a haunting and swirling piece. This is one of the few

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