SJU

'Sju' is the swedish counterpart to 'Seven' - but the album contains five songs though with a quite spacey fundament in the whole. Especially keyboards/synthesizer are providing a cosmic feeling. It's a mix of dreamy and heavy rocking elements where some songs are evolving a tribute character with distinctive reminiscences - on purpose I would say.

The straightforward This Alien Nation for example reminds me of New Model Army a lot. A typical heavy rocking piece with shouter qualities. Not to say that this is simply plagiarizing because they also add spacey effects produced by synthesizer. It's Enough and Eastern Wind on the other hand are appearing as an unique DARXTAR heavy psych prog output - full of suspense because containing breaks and turns where the latter is also presented with jamming character.

The short and fulminant album opener Obstakel will probably confuse a little bit at a first glance because sounding like out of range with a heavy eclectic touch. But then the band around guitarist Sören Bengtsson immediately changes the mood with the long title track '7'. A Pink Floyd tribute and this reminds me of the german RPWL too, but it's little more spacey in the whole because of the twittering synths. A relaxed meditative song containing great sensitive guitar work with some Gilmour reminscences. This can be definitely considered as the album's highlight.

'Sju' offers a successful dreamy floydy long track of more than sixteen minutes and is also quite interesting to check out for Hawkwind fans because of the preference on heavy space rock.