-C-

Once again, I want to add a note here that I am reviewing this album at the request of a member of the band. I have strived to make sure this does not affect my review, but you may want to keep that in mind.

-C- is listed here and on iTunes as an album, which is puzzling to me because it's actually shorter than the XIII EP that the band put out back in 2005. Like that EP - and the III of Dreamers album that preceded -C- by only a few short months - -C- creates a picture of a band who seem to have talented instrumentalists to hand and a large number of musical influences, but appear to lack the overall creative vision required to draw all of these ideas into a coherent and compelling whole. Once again, the songs just don't seem to belong together; here the band experiment with a funk/dance music bassline, as on the opening song, there they're doing dark ambient by way of King Crimson (on Darkmoor), over this way they seem to be trying to sound like Porcupine Tree, over there they're doing a good impression of late Mercury Rev.

Lacking any song of the standards of the best work of III of Dreamers, and retaining that album's crisis of identity (the crisis being that the band haven't really established an identity for themselves), and continuing the trend across all other Nurkostam releases for the band to dabble in a large number of musical approaches without committing to take the plunge in any of them, I can't give -C- more than two stars. There's a good band here waiting to get out, but it requires them to sit down, look at their influences, look at their music to date, and deciding what they want to sound like. Because sounding like *everything* and everyone who has ever influenced you is a dead end.