LONNIE LISTON SMITH — Reflections Of A Golden Dream (review)

LONNIE LISTON SMITH — Reflections Of A Golden Dream album cover Album · 1976 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
Fifth Cosmic Echoes album, and my first vinyl exposure (along with Renaissance) to SLS’s musical realm during my teen years in the late 70’s, it’s taken me about three decades to reassess this album, after having rejected it due to the disco I hated so much then. One of the things that had pushed me to investigate towards these two albums were the very “prog” artworks of Golden Dream and Renaissance, but I was soon to find out that this artwork-approach was definitely not an exact science. Notice the Rhodes keyboard sunk in the pond’s waters under the water lilies. By this time, the Cosmic Echoes line-up was finally gelling somewhat (and it would hold for two albums) with Killian, Smith,

Opening on the atrocious disco track Get Down Everybody, the slow-paced spacey instrumental Quiet Dawn that slowly segues in the mid-tempoed but gentle (instrumental as well) Sunbeams that oozes the Brazilian rhythms, then slows down with Meditations that underlines somewhat SLS’s Rhodes over-dependence.

The awful disco-funk (or funk-disco in this case) rears its ugly head on the start of the flipside, but Peace And Love is closer to mid-70’s WAR than Donna Summer. There is definite déjà-entendu feel with the upbeat funky and sung Beautiful Women, but the déjà-vu continues with the spacey instrumental Goddess Of Love and the choir scats of Inner Beauty. is a mid-paced yawner that only the two disco songs dive deeper in mediocrity. The closing title track is a fairly dissonant instrumental outro that closes the album much better than it opened.

So past the shock of the two disco drecks that opens each side of the album, Golden Dreams is yet another Cosmic Echoes album that doesn’t bring anything new to SLS’s realm, if only the bad-news disco-junk. Soooo, if you want to really spend some time discovering Liston’s world, you’d better concentrate on his early albums, despite the fact that the present will already give you the general tone, albeit much poppier than Cosmic Funk or Astral Travelling would.
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