Although this is a debut album, the roots of the band actually go back a long way and this could easily have ended up being classified as a solo album from Fred Lessing (guitars, flute, recorders, keyboard, vocals, and ethnic percussion). He has been joined on this by André Marques (acoustic and electric drums, and incidental vocals), Adriano Dias Pereira (clarinet, flute, melodica, keyboard, sax, percussion, and vocals), Paulo Catroga, (keyboards and vocals), Nino Mar (bass guitar), Joana Lessing (keyboard, percussion, and vocals, Rodrigo Caser (electric guitar), Mark Guertin (bass guitar) and Davis Raborn (drums). Although there are a lot of musicians, and I did read somewhere that they added their parts and sent them back to Fred to weave into the musical whole as opposed to recording together, the feeling is that of a group as opposed to a project.
Musically this is heavily rooted in the Seventies, with large elements of classic Genesis and Gryphon, but it is somewhat let down by the vocals. They are somewhat of an acquired taste and that combined with the very regressive prog sound results in an album that shows promise but ultimately doesn’t really deliver. Much has been made in some quarters about the fact that this band is from Portugal which isn’t normally thought of as a prog hotbed, but personally it doesn’t matter so much to me as to where a band are from as it does to how they sound. This isn’t a bad album, but having written about it I somehow can’t see myself playing it again.
www.mals.ru
