| Artist: | Moongarden |
| Title: | Brainstorm Of Emptyness |
| Label: | Mellow Records MMP 284 |
| Length(s): | 71 minutes |
| Year(s) of release: | 1995 |
| Month of review: | 04/1996 |
| 1) | Sea Memories | 11.26 |
| 2) | Who's Wrong? | 9.47 |
| 3) | Sonya In Search Of The Moon: Silver Tears | 1.26 |
| 4) | Gun Child | 8.29 |
| 5) | Is He Mommy's Little Monster? | 3.39 |
| Music By Rachmaninov | ||
| 6) | Sonya In Search Of The Moon: Alone In The Nightfield | 3.17 |
| 7) | Chrome Heart | 9.30 |
| 8) | Sonya In Search Of The Moon: The Search | 1.54 |
| 9) | Sherylin's Mistake | 8.54 |
| 10) | Sonya In Search Of The Moon: Moonman Return | 8.13 |
| 11) | The Losing Dawn | 5.02 |
The track Sonya .... is like Crying for Help on Arena's CD a track which has been split among the others and in this case entirely instrumental. It's nice, but is probably only used to have some change on the CD.
So like I said most of this album is on the dark side, which isn't surprising as Tonco of Theatre wrote all the lyrics and as they seem to fir the music, the music will not be very uplifting either.
Let's take that first track for instance: it's extremely melodic, rather dark and fluent playing. The singing is emotional (also Tonco) and a little subdued. After some time the singing becomes more forceful and an organ introduces more tempo to the track. In the middle the attention wavers a bit, but after a melodic solo, and a more threatening part, there's a good guitar solo which gives a bit of strength to the track.
The next track is rather sad and is about a father leaving his son and the problems they both have with that decision. The son blaming his father, his father feeling guilty, but after a while the son finds out that he has been rather shortsighted. Interesting is that things that happen to the son while he is young are sung with another voice (compare 12th Night in the Collector). After a very good guitar solo, we get those vocals from Great Gig in the Sky (this is even mentioned in the booklet and he says we shouldn't bother him with it. Well okay).
The fourth track is more threatening and less melodic. It tells of violence by children on the streets of the ghetto's. The chorus, I'm not too fond off, but the intermezzo is veyr forceful and driven. After some bouncing basswork, we get some ELPish organ and a sad acoustic outro as the protagonist has sadly died through violence.
The next track also uses a number of voices (all by Tonco) to mimick the presence of a father, mother and son. The voice of the mother is kind of a high, while the father is overly low. The voice of the son is just Tonco's voice. The song starts out rather classical, but gets heavier later on.
The seventh track can at times be compared to Grendel. It's quite heavy and has an abrupt change of tempo with keys and guitar and some better melodies in the middle. Then we get a piano intermezzo with some hasty singing, which is very nice and we encounter yet again the ghost of Genesis. It all ends rather quiet, acquiescient.
On track nine, there's a horde of demons following the cast out Sherylin, but Sherylin's mistake is that she is not heir boss, but is forced to lead them, after having her revenge. The music to all this starts folky with Sherylin being casty out, but later on its gets heavy and frantic as the people come from their graves to wreak her revenge. After a nother change we are well into the finale, which one might say is the demise of Sherylin.
The conclusion to Sonya is also instrumental and starts off quiet, followed into a keyboard part straight from the seventies and ends in a long guitar solo.
The last track is quiet throughout and can be likened to David Sylvians solo stuff.