While the album certainly demonstrates Eric's undoubted skills as a guitarist, thankfully he has not simply produced an album to showcase his axe manship at the expense of all else.

There is certainly a lot here in terms of variety with the cd running as it does through the range from hard rock, ballads, jazz, blues, country and even classical. Also, although over 50 percent of the album is instrumental as one might expect, there is still a nice mix of vocal pieces, which prevents the album from getting bogged down with too much of the same thing.

Rather than try and analyze this album track by track I will pick out some of the pieces that made an impression.

'The Simple Things' is the first vocal track on the album.. It comes over as a very laid back piece and utilizes light jazz touches mixed with a basic pop format. The first half of the song carries the main vocal section, but the second half introduces some superb guitar variations built around the basic melody. The soaring guitar here is expressive but never goes overboard by becoming too showy.

'Exit 10' by contrast is a faster paced and very upbeat number. From the strong ascending sequence that kicks this piece off things never look back and the tune effortlessly carries the listener along. Once again the guitar work is at the forefront, but not overpoweringly. Percussion work too is very much in evident and the emphasis seems to be very much on musical teamwork rather than one-upmanship - a fact which I think is true of the whole album.

Towards the end of the album 'Finger Pickin' Country' introduces a strong country element to the proceedings. This is quite a whimsical piece containing an element of humor while at the same time proving to be great toe tapping foot-stomping little number.

My final selection for comment is 'The Unstruck Melody (Reprise)' which is played in a strong eastern style making good use of the Sitar and once more providing a very different feel to what has gone before. having taken a look at some of the music I confess that I am in two minds about the accompanying CD insert. Rather than coming with a 12 page booklet, this album comes with a fold out affair - the purpose of this is clearly to allow the rather nice artwork to be viewed as a single piece, and in this respect it works well enough. On the downside I found that quick access to specific song information / lyrics is hindered by this format. s easily. The printing too could have been better though out too since in a number of places the wealth of pictures in the layout made the type face hard to read. So how to sum up? The music on 'Unstruck Melody' is well presented and certainly well played. There is also a wealth of variety to be found here in terms of style and sound, and the production is excellent from start to finish.