A WAY OUT

Negua is a new Spanish five piece band with members from former Spanish prog bands Dracma and Unoma. During my first musical encounter with Negua I was pleased with their sound but to me it sounded a bit polished. However, as usual for good prog, a further investigation delighted me: what a varied, adventurous and especially dynamic prog this is!

The first song Bagdad (about political failure and suffering civilians) contains a lot of tension, often with bombastic interplay between guitar and organ and inspired vocals. The ominous middle part delivers furious guitar and propulsive, militairy beats, it sounds like the musical translation of raining bombs and screaming people and reminds me of Forgotten Sons by Marillion (another complaint about political failure and suffering people). The next three songs showcase Negua their adventurous mind and variety: A Reason To Believe is melodic rock with strong guitarwork (sometimes evoking Eighties U2), Late Night contains a tight beat with delicate orchestrations and fiery guitar and Bright Light is alternating with halfway soaring keyboards and a moving guitar soli with howling runs. The final two tracks are quite long: first the very dynamic Lullaby (from dreamy to bombastic eruptions) with great guitarplay (from sensitive runs to propulsive riffs and swirling interplay with the organ) and a 'grand finale' with emotionals vocals, slow synthesizer flights and adventurous drumming and finally the three-piece composition View From The Castle (more than 20 minutes) that features Negua at their best, from biting guitar and sumptuous parts to tender piano, flashy synthesizer and twanging guitar with soaring keyboards. The vocals contain a slight accent but the emotional overtones match perfectly with the dynamic music.

The entire running time of one hour I have enjoyed Negua their fresh and modern blend of melodic rock (evoking modern Rush), neo-prog (IQ and Marillion) and symphonic prog (Genesis), this is a very promising band that has a lot to offer for progheads!

This sole release by Spanish Negua wasn't recognized by the great data base of albums that is used and shows when you put the disc in your PC or laptop. So that means we're dealing with a pretty obscure band here. But does that also mean it's not worthwhile ?

Well, already with first track I can tell you this isn't poor by any means. It's quite captivating prog rock really without qualifications as mindblowing, amazing or superb. The vocals are good enough with most similarity with Geddy Lee though not 100% by any means. The instrumental handling is very good, production is ok but no more. Compositions are pretty good but also here the superlatives can be left out of consideration.

Good/very good is the right qualification I feel and therefore the only right rating is three stars in my book. If you want to hear a rare unknown band for a change Negua is recommended.

Negua were born out of the needs of Fidel Vazquez (guitars, founder of Unoma), David Saez (drums, percussion) and David Conillera (keyboards, vocals) to form a prog-inclined project, as at the time all were part of the Heavy Metal act Onirea.The band was completed with ex- Dracma Jordi Planas on bass and singer Xavier Patricio.A year later, as Patricio could not dedicate himself 100% to the project, new singer Xiscu Lopez enters the picture and Negua recorded their debut ''A way out'' with the help of Pi-2's leader Pito Costa, finally released on Musea Records in 2006.

The style of Negua is actually very close to recent times GALAHAD, sounding like a modern Progressive Rock group, which attempts to mix different things in a one package.As such, in Negua's guitar-driven lyrical Progressive Rock one can find elements from Ethnic Music (as in the opening ''Bagdad''), Psychedelic Rock and Orchestral Rock.Unfortunately the whole effort depends much on Lopez'es voice, however this is a vocalist who tries hard to sing in English, but the result is not even questionable.Other than this, the music is very simplistic, based on heavy guitar grooves, some decent breaks and some half-interesting solos, but this motif rarely changes, resulting a slightly boring work as a whole.Additionally the lack of any serious keyboard parts make the sound one-dimensional.The later and longer tracks contain some interesting passages, almost always guitar-oriented and basically based on the groovy passages, while the keyboards and pianos become more apparent and color a bit the sound of the band.

This meant to be Negua's only effort with Vazquez focusing on his work with Unoma in the near future.''A way out'' is not interesting enough to qualify as a recommended album, the average singer and the one-dimensional sound being tha main reasons of its mediocrity...2.5 stars.