Icarus (1972) Silver Surfer

From their 1972 album The Marvel World of Icarus, an album that used the classic canon of Marvel Comic book characters as the basis for a heavy Jazzy, Prog rock album in which each character is devoted a theme song; whether serious or mocking is uncertain but lightweight in comparison to the heavy musical arrangements of smooth flute, throbbing bass and crunching guitar. Strings and saxophones complete the staccato, tributes to each superhero encapsulating them with basic lyrics and stronger focus on the structure of the song. The key characters of the Marvel universe are here with odes ranging form the Hulk to Daredevil and including a super charged intro to Thor. The arrangements are quite samey but do feature nice tempo changes to establish each figure, Black Panther is  quite measured while Spiderman's bounds about at some pace. Of course Marvel caught on to this in the States and put a halt to what was a promising group particularly in their creative song ideas. All are cloaked in the bluesy vocals of the lead singer who conveys the gamut of emotions and precise characterisations quite well

The Fantastic Four is well Fantastic, The Thing is funny and, as they all are, adept at storytelling and setup thought The Man Without Fear has a nice quiet piano mid section but undoubtedly the psychedelic Silver Surfer is the best with its subdued mix of cascading flute and phased electric guitar into a swirling, hypnotic prog rocker that best captures the superhero's essence far more subtlety sounding like a band's  composition over a TV Theme Tune reject like the majority of the album.