ISKANDER

Following the departure of original members saxophonist / flautist Sacha Van Geest and drummer Marco Vrolijk who suddenly lost their interest in crafty complex prog music after three phenomenal albums, SUPERSISTER carried on with keyboardist Robert Jan Stips and bassist Ron Van Eck picking up the pieces and taking the opportunity to reinvent the band into a completely different beast altogether. After recruiting a veritable replacement in the form of Charley Mariano formerly of Embryo and the US jazz-rock outfit Osmosis, Mariano came to the team with not only competent skills in playing saxophone and the flute but also added his talents on bass clarinet as well as the exotic South Indian double reed instrument called the nadaswaram. With 60s psychedelic drummer Herman van Boeyen of many bands including Blues Dimension, the new lineup was complete and a completely new chapter of SUPERSISTER was born.

The band tackled a completely new sound on its fourth album ISKANDER, a concept album about Alexander The Great. The album title is the Turkish name for the Macedonian king who reigned from 336-323 BCE. While not totally abandoning its Canterbury creds as heard on the Soft Machine organ and bass work, the album took on the most serious nature of SUPERSISTER's career with a wildly unpredictable ride through a mostly instrumental album that narrated the emperor in nine tracks that added up to just over 42 minutes of playing time. The album found a cameo from Pierre Morelen on marimba and percussion on "Bagoas" as well as former member Sacha van Geest dropping in for a flute performance on the closing "Looking Back (The Moral Of Herodotus)."

The album has been a divisive one with many fans of first three albums finding it to be too dramatically different from the first three but for those with a sense of adventure and an appreciation for a brilliant album outside the usual scope of a band's established sound, ISKANDER is actually a phenomenally brilliant album showcasing extremely strong musicianship and clever composiitons but then again unlike many of its Dutch counterparts, SUPERSISTER never released a single bad album out of the five that emerged under its name in its 1970s run. ISKANDER begins and ends with the sounds of antiquity with the opening "Introduction" and closing sounds of "Looking Back" but quickly embarks on a superb journey of jazzy progressive rock that showcases the band's new style as well as allowing the new members to prove their worthiness.

The first true track "Dareios The Emperor" establishes the sax as having replaced the dominant flute sounds on previous albums and also displays a firm control on excellent compositional fortitude with clever arrangements that offered diverse motifs, plenty of shifting time signatures, tempo changes and abrupt hairpin curveballs into completely unrelated yet logical extensions of the varying musical motifs that alternated into a greater sum of the parts. The music adds an exotic ancient Greek feel with various musical scales being implemented but for the most part ISKANDER is a veritable mix of jazz-rock, symphonic prog, scatterings of Canterbury jazz and wild eclectic styles from various sources. While sounding nothing like the previous SUPESISTER albums, Stips' keyboard antics are imprinted all over the album's run. The music is as dramatic as what one would expect from a great king from a faraway time and place with mood swings and stylistic shifts that dominate the soundscapes offering a journey through sound into that world. The album is surprisingly effective in evoking the spirit of its subject matter.

The album should by no means be compared with SUPERSISTER's previous albums as its really a stand alone in the band's canon but one that showcases an amazing display of prog virtuosity as well as an ability to convey a concept primarily through tones, timbres, rhythms and dynamics. The album finds scattered vocals throughout with "Bagoas" and "Babylon" featuring the most lyric oriented moments but even here the vocals are subdued and very subordinate to the musical prowess of the four members delivering an amazing powerhouse of a concept album. I honestly cannot fathom why everyone doesn't love this album. While the stylistic approach may not have been expected during its time of release, this album is absolutely brilliant on so many levels and best of all highlights how SUPERSISTER could totally reinvent itself and still deliver an above average product unlike fellow Dutch prog act Focus which quickly dropped the ball after "Hamburger Concerto." While not up to par with the band's first two masterpieces, ISKANDER is an album i enjoy thoroughly from beginning to end and am truly exhilarated by its ingenuity every time i experience it. One that deserves much more appreciation than its gotten so far :)