This ambitious concept album by veteran English folkie Al Stewart attempts the near impossible: a chronological evocation of 20th century Western history, mingling fact, legend and fantasy and culminating with dire prophecies. Despite the grandiosity of the concept, two-thirds of the album works. Stewart has done his historical research, and the scenes and events on which he chooses to meditate — President Harding alone in the White House in 1921; the death of Hitler antagonist Ernst Roehm in 1934 — provide provocative catalysts for his poetic imagination.

Backing an agile voice with relentless, rapid acoustic strumming, Stewart builds a momentum sustained throughout most of the album. Stewart's poetry is spacious, impressionistic first-person narration that only occasionally suffers from forced internal rhymes and syntactical inversion. The album's best and worst moments occur on Side Two, which opens with the excellent "Roads To Moscow." A canvas of Germany's invasion of Russia in 1941, seen through the eyes of a doomed soldier, its music takes the form of an English ballad, drawn out by melodic recitative, deepened by orchestration, and set to cinematic lyrics. "Terminal Eyes," which follows, is a postmortem suicide song, written and performed in the style of "I Am the Walrus." In conjunction with the earlier "Post World War Two Blues," an attempt at an English "American Pie" (only the time span is more than 20 years and the song much shorter than its prototype), "Terminal Eyes" develops a view of personal Armageddon that should have concluded the album.

But unfortunately Stewart closes his work with the ten-minute "Nostradamus," a modern interpretation of the French mystic's prophecies from his own time through the Seventies. What should have been a climactic finale is merely a series of oracular cliches sandwiched between overly long guitar breaks. While Stewart's reveries of past and present are credible, like most mystic mongers his futuristic summary is trite and pretentious. (RS 163)

STEPHEN HOLDEN