Bassist John Lodge and guitarist Justin Hayward may have gone their separate ways following the last Moody Blues tour, but they remain very much connected in the music they make.
This is the Birmingham-born singer’s first release since ‘Days Of Future Passed – My Sojourn’, his revisiting of the Moodies classic and features songs written through personal health challenges as well as two revised and reimagined numbers originally written in lockdown.
Variously featuring son-in-law Jon Davison of Yes, Dave Colquhoun, Ray Nesbit and John’s wife Kirsten and son Kristian, it opens with an instrumental, the dreamy ‘Sunset Over Cocohatchee Bay’ arranged for resonator guitar, named for the Florida tidal estuary that flows into the Gulf of Mexico (NOT America) before moving to the upbeat sort of title track ‘Love Will Conquer All’. With a vaguely tropical feel and chugging rhythm, given it’s a Christmas Song it’s either two months too late or 10 months early though as the songs says the message it brings:
doesn’t only have to be this time of year
The two remixes follow, ‘The Sun Will Shine’ originally a single from 2021 (and sounding more ELO than Moody Blues) and, from a year earlier, the lockdown isolation referencing more ballad-oriented ‘These Crazy Times’. The near six-minute final number, the mid-tempo ‘Whispering Angels’, co-written with Davison and featuring guest appearances by fellow Yes man Geoff Downes, is very much of a 70s slow anthemic rock persuasion. One for the faithful rather than bait for new ears, but clearly the work of a man who knows his craft.