Monday 14 March 2016

Rockin' Edward (Iron Duke, 1974)

Here you are a Danish prog act from the Golden Era of our genre, playing a keyboard-driven progressive rock, full of classical echoes and tempo changes. This suite, titled "Rockin' Edward", comes from their debut album "First Salvo" and includes all their trademark features. Like ELP, they decide to re-arrange, expand and loosely adapt a classical standard, Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suite, based on a drama by Ibsen. Compared with ELP, Iron Duke are softer and more on the melodic side of rock, but this is a dynamic and diversified track all the same, let alone a well performed one.

Iron Duke also released a second album titled "Gammel Dansk".

I like very much the vintage but never too dated sounds of this epic, and also the military mood surfacing here and there during the track. Some guitars  also grace "Rockin' Edward", adding the right amount of roughness to the big picture, that never goes too affected nor too smooth. In short, this song perfectly represents its period and still delights my ears. What about yours?

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