Exercises - NAZARETH***

I Will Not Be Led/Cat's Eye Apple Pie/In My Time/Woke Up This Morning/Called Her Name/Fool About You/Love Now You're Gone/Madeleine/Sad Song/1692 (Glen Coe Massacre)

Exercises was the follow up album from the heavy rockers Nazareth, and is more acoustic and mellower than their other releases. With a return to a more hard rock sound they would achieve commercial breakthrough with their next album.

“Exercises is a real mellow Nazareth release although I prefer their more hard rock output. Even though it's mellow, there are several good tracks here.”

“Exercises is an early Nazareth LP, featuring a kind of rock that's pretty distant from what made the band well known, straightforward pub rock intertwined with great ballads. Here, all that is absent, and instead there is blues-rock, folk and orchestrated songs.”

“The album sounds dated and old-fashioned for its time, and is not something memorable from their back catalogue, except maybe Madeleine, a lost gem in the vast Nazareth discography.”

“An odd, laid back, mainly acoustic album, kind of a downer. Not very memorable and not much by way of rock songs here.”

“Nazareth's second album, is somewhat out of place, being released between their harder rocking debut and their pioneering heavy metal breakthrough. The songs are mostly acoustic ditties with some semi-hard blues rock thrown in. There is also one of the most definitive angry atheist statements ever in I Will Not Be Led.”

“Nazareth decided to make a more mellow-sounding album with more focus on songwriting instead of on rocking out and having fun. This makes it clearly different from everything else the band ever did.”

“I Will Not Be Led features atheistic lyrics and a moody atmosphere complemented by some orchestration. Cat's Eye Apple Pie is a great harmonica driven tune that can instantly make you feel good when you're down. In My Life is the weakest song on the album, but it's not without charm. Woke Up This Morning is a cool tune with a great beat. Fool About You will stick in your head for a long time, an awesome acoustic rocker with a brilliant vocal melody. Madeleine might be the most beautiful, moving, painfully emotional ballad that was ever put on record.”