I began thinking of Bonnie Tyler while I was listening to this album. Not because it sounded like a Bonnie Tyler album but more than I had started to imagine doves in flight, women with big hair and the gratuitous use of wind machines. I’m pretty sure that the Dumfries based collective that is Six Notes did not have Jim Steinman in mind as a source of inspiration but when the music moves you…
“Part Six” is nonetheless a curiously soothing album that belies its ambient electronica persona as it meanders – and I mean that in a positive way – from start to somewhere out in the fields. As in this band’s previous albums, little human touches such as guitars turn up and do their thing just when you begin to think that you are on a bus to sequenced hell while, to further enhance the underlying humanity, Gillian Landsburgh uses her voice to nails things down with her turn on “Die For You” suggesting no less than commercial awareness.
As the doves fly way and the sun rises, you realise that this is no less than a prog rock album pretending to be an exercise in programming. In a different time and place, an album by a band like Six Notes would be the certain to become the holy grail of the record collector.