She Said/Happy Old World/Song For Dying/Galadriel/Mocking Bird/Vanessa Simmons/Ball & Chain/Lady Loves
Once Again was the aptly titled follow up album from the British progressive band Barclay James Harvest. Despite competent musicianship they never managed to shake off their reputation for a lack of originality.
“Opening with a swell of strings and some enthusiastic drumming, Once Again starts in exactly the way you'd want an album by a band with the heavyweight pastoralprog reputation of Barclay James Harvest to start, a bit epic, a bit moody, topped with some overdone guitar work and a slightly haughty sounding vocal. Rock music just doesn't do this sort of thing anymore.”
“Once Again is a highly enjoyable progressive rock journey with mostly really decent material inside. The mighty opener She Said could actually be their best song ever. The rest are really enjoyable too, especially Mocking Bird and the heavy Ball & Chain, please my ears on this one.”
“This for me is by far their best album. They plugged away for years in the UK without really achieving any commercial success. Some of their other albums have good songs on them but there is a consistency here they were unable to match elsewhere.”
“As with much of Barclay James Harvest, Once Again doesn't sound horribly original, with an obvious nod to the Moody Blues, and even at its best this album still falls a bit short of their classic work. Nonetheless, a consistently good-to-great album that is probably worth checking out for any fan of 70s art/prog rock.”
“A grand opus of a piece that is really too clever for its own good, that sounded avant-garde in its day, with loads of atmosphere.”
“They have been plagued with stylistically aping other bands while not contributing any ideas of their own. It's like having some sort of bizarre cover band in which they perform only their own material, but completely in the style of other bands current to the scene.”
“When FM radio was starting to make inroads, this is one of the records that got frequent air play. Most noteworthy was Mocking Bird – it still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”
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