IDEAL STANDARDS VOL. 1

I've read that this debut took four years to make, and that the group - with quite a difficult name! - was founded to bring the progressive rock genre (the complex core essence of it) back to life after the dormant 80's and 90's. Of course they weren't alone in that attempt, nor among the very first ones, but it's true that Finnish prog releases of those decades were much more often Psychedelic Space Rock, or something else, than "hardcore" prog so to speak. CDFmE's categorizing into Neo Prog is accurate enough, but they're not half as typical Neo as especially AGENESS had been. A bit later the more Eclectic Finnish prog bands such as DISCORDIA appeared, but CDFmE is stylistically somewhere in between.

The group's mastermind Antti Pesonen is responsible of the lion's share in the whole recording process, both in writing the music (collaborating with other members to some degree) and in producing it. He handles guitars, synths, vocoder, programming and sound manipulation, plus bass on two tracks. The main bassist is Rami Talja, a.k.a. Qumma [see QUMMA CONNECTION], and the bass really can be heard loud and clear on this album. An important part of the sound is the musically educated main vocalist Katja Sirkiä who has a wide range in her voice. She resembles TOYAH, both for the voice itself and for the theatrical, at times even loonie singing style.

The music is mostly built on guitars and keyboards equally, and it gets quite heavy at times. Especially the first half of the album has a nice spirit of brave, crazy creativity but towards the end that spirit is replaced by more typical (less original) Neo Prog approach. 'The Probe' could be Landmarq as Sirkiä sounds a bit like Tracy Hitchings. The 10-minute closing track 'Stop the Machine!' is doubtlessly the most ambitious composition, but higher level of exciting originality is heard earlier on the album.

A truly noteworthy debut of pure progressive rock, even if slightly uncoherent as a whole. The leaflet tells the listener to "Look forward to Volume 2 in the near future!", but their next album came in 2009, entitled Land of Hope.