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Advent - Cantus Firmus CD (album) cover

CANTUS FIRMUS

Advent

 

Eclectic Prog

3.41 | 79 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

toroddfuglesteg
5 stars Finally, an album which hits the right tangents.

Once in a blue moon, I get a bit of a blue period where everything is a struggle. Not that I am complaining. My life is excellent. But I am struggling in all aspects of life at the moment and I am also starting to feel my age. Accumulations of life experiences is also a factor and I am starting to look back on mistakes, on relatives recently passed away, on personal conflicts and on chances I once had but did not take up.

Advent has by accident delivered the perfect soundtrack for my struggles with this album. An album that hits my heart strings and the right tangents.

Talking about tangents, I am surprised that nobody have mentioned the The Tangent in their reviews. The similarities are pretty many, music wise. Yes, Advent sounds like both Gentle Giant and the Cathedral who delivered Stained Glass Stories back in the 1970s. This album has rekindled my interest for Gentle Giant and that's a very good thing. But as in the album title, which I guess is latin, Cantus Firmus also points at the RPI scene. PFM is a good reference. But there is also plenty of references to the likes of Strawbs and Manning here. Not to mention the old gregorian music which was once heard in all cathedrals and churches around Europe. All this is solid pluses in my book.

The sound of this album is pointing both backwards and forwards. Backwards to the baroque and folk music scene. Forwards to what I guess is going to become a pretty good Eclectic scene where all bands and inspirations above is going to get fused into one sound. This album is therefore a pretty modern sounding album. The sound is excellent.

The songs on Cantus Firmus is both long and excellent. The opening minute is cheesy, but the album soon gets into a more familiar territory. The music is keyboards, guitars and flute and mandolin driven. The vocals is excellent. The music is very symphonic and complex. It is not the easiest album to penetrate and it will take the listener some time to understand it. This is by no means easy-listening and I am sure even Yes fans will like the complexity of this album. The best song is Ramblin' Sailor by a small margin. This song is an excellent fusion of Gentle Giant, Manning and The Tangent.

So why not four stars instead of full pot, the magic five ? Advent has induced something into their music most other bands does not in a scene full of geeks and over-intellectual people: Soul. Some will say Cantus Firmus is overly sentimental. And that is why I think this is a love/hate album. You either embrace the gregorian chant grandeur and soul in this album or you regard it as a piece of over-sentimental hyperbole. But for me; this album plays on my heartstrings and hits the right tangents. Besides of that; the music on Cantus Firmus is absolute excellent in it's own right. For me, this is one of the rare five stars I am giving out. I doubt I will give out many other five stars here in PA. But this one deserves it. Cantus Firmus is an orgy of excellent music and a big pointer towards the future of progressive rock. Maybe because Cantus Firmus is an own kind of music, according to online music resources. But I am not that clever so I do not know. I only know that I really love this album and it is the soundtrack of my life at the moment........... and probably for the next forty years.

A masterpiece, no less.

5 stars

toroddfuglesteg | 5/5 |

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