Recycled (Deluxe Version)

Recycled was Nektar's last album with guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Roye Albrighton, and their last in Germany. The band were riding the success of a Top 20 album in the States and a Gold album in West Germany at the time and began recording the set at a studio in France. They finished the music, but bailed to George Martin's Air studio in London to finish the vocals. The album was originally mixed by Geoff Emerick, the Beatles' engineer. The band were not satisfied with the result, and Steve Nye and Bill Price did a second run-through. Also, synth pioneer Larry Fast was on-board for this set, adding additional layers of keyboards to an already complex tapestry of them. And herein lie Recycled's problems. It sounds like it was still a work in progress, something not quite finished, not quite articulated properly, and most importantly, it sounds like the excesses of the 1970s finally caught up with Nektar. The great raw crunch of Albrighton's guitar is almost lost throughout, and the duetting of Mo Moore's knotty basslines and Taff Freeman's keyboard lines are awash in thematic concerns and the sheer bombast of the band's production mania. Indeed, there is a choir present here in addition to Fast and the morass is just too much for the songs to hold up on their own. The 2004 CD edition includes both the finished album mix and the Geoff Emerick mix, both completely remastered for CD. While Remember the Future showed Nektar expanding their sound into new music directions, Recycled sounds like they decided the music was secondary to the sonics. It's just plain terrible. (Think Styx meets Phil Collins' era Genesis with Tomita playing keyboards.) Shudder.