YWIS

Dutch Prog Nostalgia Part One. I bought this album when it was just released in1983 and remember very well that I noticed on the back cover that the adress of Ywis was in The Hague, my hometown. In those days (just before the Marillion-era) the Dutch progrock scene was not very prolific so every proggish effort was embraced warmly. And I did because I was also a bit proud to be from The Hague too. Ywis their neo-prog sounds pleasant but I have to admit that the level of the compositions is mediocre, the English lyrics are even a bit amateurish (often about war and the human being). The only highlight on Ywis their eponymous album is the instrumental titletrack in which guitarplayer Rinus Hollenberg (later a member of one of the last new Q65 line-ups) delivers excellent, very moving guitarwork. It's a pity that his skills are hardly used because I am sure that he would have been able to add a bit more excitement to Ywis their music on this album. After Ywis their demise, keyboard player Julian Driessen joined other prog bands like The Last Detail, Timelock and For Absent Friends. To everybody's surprise Ywis released a second studio-album entitled Leonardo's Dream in 1995. Unfortunately I cannot tell you about it because I have never heard it. End of the story ...

I dusted off this cd because I wanted to review it, played it again and looked for some back ground info about band and CD. Some interesting things came up. This album is already from 1983 which I couldn't remember and re-issued ten years later. What I did remember was that this band is strongly connected to Timelock a favourite band of mine for many years (see me reviews there). The connection is not that strange since both bands are from The Hague in the Netherlands. I don't know the background of this connection and the whole story behind it, just that keyboardist Julian Driessen en guitarist Rinus Hollenberg are (have been) in both bands. The resemblance between the bands is there though not too obvious because Ywis is more leaning to the metal side of neo prog and Timelock is really pure neo prog. We'll concentrate on this one now and what I can say about it is that it's a nice debut without being real spectacular. The first song is almost a protest song against the human race. I remeber an article about Ywis which stated that the problem of Ywis was coming up with suitable lyrics for their songs. For this they hired a female songwriter who amongst others wrote this song for them. The band did the music themselves afterwards. So it's interesting, a song with such lyrics, at least original. Nice track by the way. Next is about an alcohol addict, a somewhat slower song but ok. The third is another good track about a streaker. Interesting songwriter, this woman. In this song is a very nice instrumental part by the way. Then comes an instrumental one which is named after the band, good track. The next three songs are the lesser of this album. Not much to say about them, except for the lyrics of common sense versus bombs, could have been inspired by the cold war which was very actual in 1983. Last song is probably the highlight of the album, starting with an instrumental part added by vocal parts later on, some sort of epic track, at least for Ywis standards. All in all a pretty good debut for Ywis but it's not really essential in prog history. Their successor is much better. 3 stars (3,25).