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Morse Code - Procréation CD (album) cover

PROCRÉATION

Morse Code

 

Symphonic Prog

3.63 | 71 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

ClemofNazareth
Special Collaborator
Prog Folk Researcher
2 stars The apparent humor and other lyrical themes of this album are unfortunately lost on non-French speakers. But the fast-paced if occasionally pedantic keyboards overcome that drawback for the most part.

As a kid in northern Montana I seem to remember these guys having some very brief popularity under the name Morse Code Transmission. It wasn’t all that unusual for us to be exposed to quite a bit of Canadian music though, and I’ve read these guys toured a lot back then, so I suppose it’s possible they appeared somewhere in our general vicinity like in Alberta or Saskatchewan or something. Not sure, but I definitely remember this album cover because it kind of creeped me out.

But by this time their sound had moved away from that early seventies harder rock/psych sound and into this Harmonium-like Francoprog thing, and any appeal they had to mountain hicks was largely lost.

The organ and mellotron make the album, but I personally have never been able to get too excited about this kind of understated, pristine type of sound. The instrumental passages seem to drag on forever, often with little variation and meaningless repetition of mostly organ sequences that just don’t grab me at all.

The lengthy three-part title track offers a fair bit of dynamic electric guitar around the middle, but here again the organ goes for long stretches of repetitive playing, shifting tempo and key only to drift into another repetitive progression. There’s some Banks- like styling here I suppose, but the French singers don’t come even close to comparing to the dynamic presence of Peter Gabriel. This whole back side of the album really reminds me quite a bit of innumerable and forgettable mid-seventies pretentious pop bands.

So I think I’ll give this two stars since there seems to be adequate evidence that fans of the band and this style of symphonic prog seem to appreciate the album. Not my thing, but if you’re into bands like Harmonium and milder and more ethnic Genesis clones you might get into this.

peace

ClemofNazareth | 2/5 |

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