OPUS I

This is an album I will not review thoroughly. And this is because there are a few aspects of this band and album that tell the whole story and make it quite useless to do for instance song by song reviewing.

And then I'm talking mainly about the vocals of Hakan Nilsson. In some of my reviews I stated that I would not complaint too emphatic about vocals anymore since many progbands happen to deal with (very) debatable vocals. But mr Nilsson is where I draw the line unfortunately. This voice really gets on my nerves and worse of all: is present very dominantly in just about every song on this album. Besides this he is most of the time accompanied by a very annoying organ that has more or less the same impact on me as the vocals. And if I tell you we are talking about 80-90 % of the sound on this album with these two negative aspects I think I made myself clear enough.

This is a personal opinion though. I read a review on an Uzbeki (!) prog review website about this album and the reviewer was actually very positive and gave it 4 stars. So I have to say this in the benifit of the album. I would take a careful listen before buying this is my last advice. I can only give this one star because of the statements above. Maybe I should be more respectful to it because it's from 1983, as most of us know a year in a period (early eighties) in which prog was just about stone dead and neo prog was trying to revive it. I know this but still I can do nothing else but judging it for what it sounds like.