To Keep from Crying is the second album by progressive folk band Comus

Comus (band)

Comus is a British progressive rock / folk band which had a brief career in the early 1970s; their first album, First Utterance, gave them a cult following which persists. They have revived in the late 2000s and played several festivals.-History:...

, released in 1974. It featured a notably different lineup from their other releases, with the violin/viola and woodwind spots replaced by keyboards and a conventional drum kit

Drum kit

A drum kit is a collection of drums, cymbals and often other percussion instruments, such as cowbells, wood blocks, triangles, chimes, or tambourines, arranged for convenient playing by a single person ....

. The album's content has also been noted as being more common than their earlier work, centered more in conventional progressive rock and folk.

Reception

Allmusic's retrospective review praised the vocal arrangements and male/female harmonies of songs such as "Figure in Your Dreams" and "Perpetual Motion", and were even more endeared to "dark folk songs" such as "Touch Down", with its "ghostly children's chorus" and "cosmic synth tones". However, they criticized the Japanese issue of the album for editing "Waves and Caves" and "After the Dream" down to well under a minute each and concluded "The record is pretty good, but it has the misfortune of paling in the shadow of its nightmarish predecessor."

Track listing

Personnel

Comus

• Bobbie Watson – lead and backing vocals, percussion, recorder
  Recorder
  The recorder is a woodwind musical instrument of the family known as fipple flutes or internal duct flutes—whistle-like instruments which include the tin whistle. The recorder is end-blown and the mouth of the instrument is constricted by a wooden plug, known as a block or fipple...
  
  
• Roger Wootton - guitar
  Guitar
  The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
  
  , lead and backing vocals
• Keith Hale – keyboards, marimba
  Marimba
  The marimba is a musical instrument in the percussion family. It consists of a set of wooden keys or bars with resonators. The bars are struck with mallets to produce musical tones. The keys are arranged as those of a piano, with the accidentals raised vertically and overlapping the natural keys ...
  
  
• Andy Hellaby – bass
  Bass guitar
  The bass guitar is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb , or by using a pick....
  
  , autoharp
  Autoharp
  The autoharp is a musical string instrument having a series of chord bars attached to dampers, which, when depressed, mute all of the strings other than those that form the desired chord. Despite its name, the autoharp is not a harp at all, but a chorded zither. -History:There is debate over the...
  
  , tape effects
• Gordon Caxon – drums, percussion

Guest musicians

• Philip Barry – bongos
• Lindsay Cooper
  Lindsay Cooper
  Lindsay Cooper is an English bassoon and oboe player, composer and political activist. Best known for her work with the band Henry Cow, she was also a member of Comus, National Health, News from Babel and David Thomas and the Pedestrians...
  
   – bassoon on "To Keep from Crying"
• Didier Malherbe
  Didier Malherbe
  Didier Antonin Malherbe is a saxophonist and flautist. He was one of the founders of the Canterbury sound band Gong....
  
  – saxophone on "Get Yourself a Man"
• Tim Kraemer – cello on "So Long Supernova"