Almost a master piece album. This does sound like british prog unlike many of their later albums-

Tales is the masterpiece song, Blind Eye is pretty amazing while not quite as good as Wishbone Ash's same titled song and Magician's Birthday manages to sound interesting even with its -- unnessearily long? -- instrumental wankery for the whole of it. Not their best album, but one my favorites and may be a little bit underrated. Ken Hensley proved once again that he could write some ingenious songs.

The title track starts off great, the first 4 minutes are both haunting and mysterious, then comes the middle part and I find it to be a bit too messy, the recurrent birthday melody is pretty cool but sadly it doesn't really go anywhere in my opinion and at the end you feel a bit cheated. Luckily most of the other songs deliver what they promise and in the end I really like this album and there's no denying how good Uriah Heep was at this point. Is it worth a 9? Maybe, will return to this one again soon.

Such an overlooked album Imo. The title track is amazing, but the album as a whole is brimmed with top quality tracks. This band could do no wrong for me during this 70's era.