Ashes Are Burning

Renaissance remain criminally obscure — less known than Genesis, Yes, or ELP despite producing work that equals or surpasses those bands at their best. The reason is partly bad luck and partly that Annie Haslam’s five-octave soprano was a genuinely unusual instrument for rock music, one that required listeners willing to meet the band somewhere between classical and rock that not everyone was prepared to go in 1973.

“Ashes Are Burning” is their magnum opus, and it closes their breakthrough album with a structural ambition that takes the listener through four distinct movements in eleven minutes. The opening is folk-inflected — acoustic guitar and Haslam’s voice in their most intimate configuration, the lyric gentle and pastoral. Renaissance at their most approachable, and that accessibility is doing work: establishing trust before demanding it.

The middle section introduces orchestral elements — the band’s keyboard player John Tout working with arranger Michael Dunford to create something that genuinely sounds like a small orchestra, not a keyboard approximation of one. The complexity builds steadily through the third movement, Haslam’s voice ascending through registers that most singers cannot access, the arrangement growing denser without losing clarity.

“Rise up through the haze / Let the sun shine through your eyes.”

The final movement’s electric guitar climax — Michael Dunford’s solo arriving after eight minutes of orchestral scaffolding — lands with the force of something genuinely earned. This is the craft of the slow build at its most self-aware: ten minutes of patient, beautiful preparation for two minutes of release.

If you have only heard “Ashes Are Burning” through a single listen, you have not heard it. This is a piece that reveals itself across repeated encounters, each pass through the material finding something that wasn’t audible the last time.