Sankara

 

From the short samples on Amazon this promises to be a very fine Melodic Rock/AOR album with perhaps just a hint of prog, but we won't know for sure unless someone who already has the CD (yes, there are some circulating following the band's appearance at the Cambridge Rock Festival last month), or the band themselves, can provide samples for the team (It'll almost certainly be Crossover who get to evaluate this) to listen to.

 

The Enigma EP from last year can be heard on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/sankaramusic or facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sankaramusic or spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/4DG2BAM4xmt3CFc5sXGukV, who also have the single 'Precious Things': http://open.spotify.com/album/4XRmLL6FAy4K8SUCRjYasm.

 

Again, this music is very well crafted Melodic Rock/AOR, great to listen to, but rather weak on the prog side.

 

The reviews section of the band's website bear this out too: http://sankara.co.uk/reviews/, as does Keishiro's response when the band was suggested in this forum last year, around the time of the release of the EP: http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=80771 - in fact he even went as far as to say that the site couldn't give them any place to live in...

 

Have matters changed sufficiently with the new material to make him change his view, I ask...

 

The band is from Cardiff, Wales, so maybe Steve (lazland) knows more about them?

 

Bass player Rhayn Jooste actually left the band in early August, just after the C.R.F. gig, and as far as I know has not yet been replaced.

 

Until we have full samples of 'Guided By Degrees', there's not much more we can do with this at the moment to be honest, so we await further input, as the saying goes...

 

In the meantime:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hmmm very nice, but is it prog...?  

 

The show also featured some more excellent melodic prog in the form of Primitive Instinct's new album 'One Man's Refuge', and Legend's recently re-mastered epic track 'Triple Aspect', originally released in 1996, before Sankara's album begins, so move the slider along to somewhere around the 2hr 14min 30sec mark to start off with Sankara's stuff. http://www.livestream.com/aiiradionet/video?clipId=pla_1c128059-e37b-4568-abbf-61ada2bcef82

 

The team will need to move quite quickly on this, as the recording of the show will be taken down just before next week's is due, and I don't know of any other free sample sources.

 

http://soundcloud.com/sankaramusic (7 samples - mainly old stuff, but including one finished track and also a demo from 'Guided By Degrees')

 

Definitely belongs on here in my view, but not sure about the sub - it's a mix of Crossover, Neo and a bit of Heavy to my ears. Has a quite a strong Hard Rock/AOR feel in places too I suppose, but this is really quite excellent stuff on balance - hopefully there'll be enough prog overall to satisfy the judges. 

 

Edit: Ignore that crap I wrote just up there about not knowing of any other sample sources: http://open.spotify.com/album/2wTFK420G3vUEphlZiqZmj    And for those living in countries that don't have spotify, or who merely don't like it, there is a small flash-based media player about half way down the band's homepage: http://sankara.co.uk, which is loaded with all the songs in an auto-playlist (full samples). I couldn't get the scroll bar to work on my computer (the 'now playing' info popped up and masked it out everytime I moved the mouse over the player to try to move it), so the last three titles weren't immediately accessible - I had to wait for them to load automaticlly one by one in sequence after track seven had finished playing. Small matter really though.

 

Now let's get 'em on the site!