THICK AS A BRICK

Since I was a little child, music has two different scenarios: The poppy happy flat easy music and the rhythmical sonorous mindscapes painted among strings, drums, melodic keyboards, voices and golden wind breathes. The master opus from the Scottish band was not only my first contact with progressive but a universe inside imagination that cross through years lands and times leading the journey since the ears in love.

The whole album is a challenge and a wonder at the same time. Running in different times, passing scene after scene in a timeless world that could speak of magic near lawyers and jailed criminals among castles and knights.

Even when the folk base its clear, the musical energy from the whole opus itself requires different platforms and styles welded over those free spirit folk sounds. Impossible ended to listen it without feeling full of hope, love, happiness.

Sure there's nothing that hasn't been wrote about the most epic and progressive record of the band, but a little more cajolery wont' harm. Really don't mind if you sit this one out...

Since the acoustic begging the british folk comes along as a master of ceremonies eloquently guiding listeners into a magic landscape. But the rock does not wait for appears and soon, still folky, beats with rousing movements remaining the medieval power struggle among the folk chords and the blues based rock lines. An electric organ remains the listener into the very past, obscure and stirring. An acoustic leitmotif serenades the fields and runs into the court attending lawyers remembering for their childhood plays and comic heroes with joyful energy.

Then the percussion crumbles into dark ages back to the rocking power struggle claims for intoxicant attention that drifts into an acid whirlpool and quiets for a new spring folk leitmotif bridges into a dusky lament, there where the sad tunes ask the sun returns for the morrow and the dark knight arrives in the middle of the night after a devastating inglorious battle. The flute sounds like metallic tears and the organ turns the shadows darker.

The gloom of the night points to the day and the electric guitar lead the march of a new battle in a new time. A warmer summer ballad is rushing through the instruments until a last refrain summing up those joyful passages and growing among wild violin flowers in between the violent vertiginous rock slipstream.

The acoustic leitmotif soothes the atmosphere and farewell with a merry sigh.