Pallas - The Sentinel (1984) {2004, Reissue}

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Pallas - The Sentinel (1984) {2004, Reissue}

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Pallas are a progressive rock band based in the United Kingdom. They were one of the bands at the vanguard of what was termed neo-progressive during progressive rock's second-wave revival in the early 1980s. Other major acts included Marillion, IQ, Twelfth Night, Pendragon, Quasar and Solstice. The Sentinel is the debut album by British Progressive rock band Pallas. It is a concept album with lyrics based upon Cold War themes, using a futuristic version of the tale of Atlantis as a metaphor for a technologically advanced society brought to the brink of destruction. The cover artwork is by Patrick Woodroffe.

Much of the album's material first appeared in the Atlantis Suite, an epic science fiction rock opera which was a cornerstone of live Pallas shows at the time. The band's original intent was that the album would present the entire piece as a concept album, with the following running order:

Side 1
"Rise and Fall (Part One)" - 6:05
"Eastwest" - 4:58
"March on Atlantis" - 5:23
"Rise and Fall (Part Two)" - 4:08

Side 2
"Heart Attack" - 7:59
"Atlantis" - 7:59
"Ark of Infinity" - 7:05

The group did in fact record the entire suite at the time; however, EMI wanted the group to balance its progressive efforts with more commercial songs, such as "Eyes in the Night" (AKA "Arrive Alive"), "Cut and Run", and "Shock Treatment", and as a result, only four of the songs from the Atlantis Suite were presented in the original version of the album, and then not in the preferred running order, obscuring the original concept entirely. The excised songs were issued as B-sides and EP tracks. This frustrated many of the band's existing fans, since anyone who wanted to hear the entire Atlantis Suite would have to buy the album and all of the associated EPs and singles.

The ultimate result was an album which satisfied nobody. The group felt that the album had been compromised, and their existing fans were annoyed that the album didn't present the intact Atlantis Suite as they had been expecting. New listeners found the Atlantis concept impossible to follow due to the missing songs and muddled running order of the remaining material, and EMI themselves were disappointed with the low sales of the album and the failure of the commercial songs to attract a wider audience. The album was eventually re-released on CD in 1992, under the Centaur Records label, with bonus tracks and a different running order; the commercial tunes the band recorded at EMI's behest are put at the start of the running order as a "warm-up", whilst the remainder of the album consists of the Atlantis Suite in its entirety, as originally recorded in 1984 and as the band intended it to be presented all along. The record has been re-released again in 2004 under the Insideout label on a numbered, special edition CD with added cd-rom content. In its August 2013 issue the British magazine Prog ran an article on the album in its series "The Albums that Saved Prog".