A SZERELEM SIVATAGA

I'm a bit confused with this band because of the popularity it had with it's most famous album Huseq. I have this album myself and will review it soon but wasn't really thrilled with it. Most of our prog reviewers were however looking at their reviews and ratings so I begin to wonder what I'm missing when I listen to this band.

East is a Hungarian neo progressive band with their heyday in the eighties.The music is actually quite simple but the band has some mollifying aspects that could be the trick here. They sing in their native language, sound pretty timid and the production quality is a bit modest to say the least. And maybe also the fact that in the eighties the usual production quality wasn't exactly high in most cases and let's not forget on top of that Hungary was still communistic when most of their albums were released and didn't have as much contact with western music as nowadays.

Anyway, despite this all, if I have to give my opinion about what I hear it's hard for me to become enthusiastic. I usually don't give extra points for reasons as mentioned above. I give my judgement about what I hear and that's it. And East just doesn't do it for me. Like I said, the music is simple, there are no highlights where songs or instrumental ingenuity are concerned. The most interesting aspect I could discover was some nice percussion in some of the songs. But if that is all I'm afraid the rating will have to be limited here. 2 stars.