Days of future passed

"This album marked the formal debut of the psychedelic-era Moody Blues; though they'd made a pair of singles featuring new (as of 1966) members Justin Hayward and John Lodge, Days of Future Passed was a lot bolder and more ambitious. What surprises first-time listeners — and delighted them at the time — is the degree to which the group shares the spotlight with the London Festival Orchestra without compromising their sound or getting lost in the lush mix of sounds. That's mostly because they came to this album with the strongest, most cohesive body of songs in their history, having spent the previous year working up a new stage act and a new body of material (and working the bugs out of it on-stage), the best of which ended up here".

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"Even when taken in context as a fructose indulgence from the flower meadows of 1967, Days Of Future Passed still sounds oddly anomalous. It's not just that it's a rich old pudding, elaborate as the pattern on a kipper tie: it's more that its reputation as a prog benchmark seems an uncomfortable fit when its light-classical orchestral passages are so fixedly middle of the road ... For all the chocolate-box romanticism of those string arrangements - and even if Another Morning is so effete that it makes The Free Design look like cage fighters - the album is still an earnest keeper. Peak Hour is a pop belter, not unlike a Move/ Shadows hybrid; the spare and strange Twilight Time skirts psychedelia with a surge of vocal tape echo; and the solemn, sorrowful Nights In White Satin remains impervious to cynicism - an impregnable castle made of Mellotrons".

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