NOSTRADAMUS 2.0 - RETURNITY

Hungarian prog band Solaris are back with their 5th studio album. What we have here is transcendant musicianship with all instruments working very well with eachother and having their time to shine. Their music is still filled with the beautiful melodies and occasional latin vocals (maybe a bit more this time around). The composition is top notch and the music flows so very well, you won't ever be bored listening to this album. Its mind boggling that 35 years after their debut this band is still able to put out such amazing music. This is a masterpiece and for me the release of the year: 5 stars without a doubt.

If you already know the masterpiece (yes, masterpiece) Nostradamus Book of Secrets you will find here the same melodies, the same compositional vein, the same listening pleasure. How many times do we find boring prog albums? Here virtuosity is at home, the exaltation passes from song to song, and from musical phrase to phrase within the same song, always new ideas continuously! And always keeping on the variation of a melodic background vein. Fantastic. 5 stars. Between the two Nostradamus Book of Secrets remains superior in the degree of emotional involvement that it is capable of arousing: his melodies for me remain unmatched and it is one of the prog records that I love most of all, this 2.0 Returnity despite being on the same style is slightly lower. But always a great album. 5 stars.

Nobody foresaw this!

Solaris can do nothing wrong, every one of their studio albums are excellent. They are however few and far between, and this album came out of nowhere last year without warning. 20 years after Nostradamus - Book Of Prophecies comes Nostradamus 2.0 - Returnity (Unborn Visions). If you are familiar with the former 1999 album, you will have a pretty good idea of what to find here, and both albums are equally great.

The album holds only four songs, but one of them is over half an hour long. The vocals are (as far as I can tell) sung in Latin, and there are both male and female voices to be heard. The focus does however lie on the instrumental attack of flutes, keyboards, guitars, bass and drums.

Personally, I like the band's two Martian Chronicles albums even more, but I am very happy to see that Solaris are still active and releasing new material in their inimitable style. I am less happy though to see that they are not getting the attention they deserve. If you enjoyed past Solaris releases, this one will not disappoint.

Highly recommended!

Thirty-five years and fifth studio album only for SOLARIS, that's something to mark the spirits and also its territory, that of symphonic progressive rock which therefore owes as much to classical music as to rock music. SOLARIS discs are always difficult to obtain, faith of chronicler, even if it is a little simpler than thirty years ago... I will not repeat the history of the Magyar group for you, you will find everything you need here.

For connoisseurs, from the first minutes of "Returnity", the river piece which opens the album and which displays no less than thirty-four minutes, we recognize the SOLARIS leg whether it is by the flute of Attila KOLLAR or the guitar multiplied by Csaba BOGDAN, sometimes metallic, sometimes melodic; of course Robert ERDESZ's keyboards are no exception but above all provide the symphonic foundation of this "Nostradamus 2.0", Doctor Robert is not a character who is used to pulling the cover to him.

The six episodes of this peplum correspond to six dates for which I have not necessarily found historical traces; for December 2, 1942, we have the first nuclear chain reaction; for April 26, 1986, a recent date of sinister memory, the explosion of the CHERNOBYL nuclear power plant; for June 30, 1905, place to Albert EINSTEIN who sends to the German magazine "Annalen der Physik" his manuscript with the following question "Can we run after a light ray and catch it?" In this case, what would we see?

1969: September 2 is the birth of the ancestor of the Internet and July 20, of course, are the first steps of man on the moon!!! Thank you gentlemen ARMSTRONG, ALDRIN and COLLINS ..... And with all that in mind, well the listener does not see the piece pass, all in his thoughts and his dreams that he is! We will add at the conclusion of this historical unfolding, "Deep Blue" on May 11, 1997, it was the first time that a computer beat a human being in a game of chess and not just any chess since it was about Garry Kasparov.

Admittedly, the unfolding of this chronicle is more like a history lesson than an in-depth study of the music of SOLARIS, but that was the minimum to understand the approach of our Hungarian friends; conclusion, the music of SOLARIS goes very well with our time and what is happening there, if you like progressive music with a symphonic tendency, with here very rare sung passages it's simple, go for it.