SKYLINE

I am at a stage in my life where I feel I have saturated my acquisitions of new prog rock acts to my collection as I often feel I have so much good stuff to listen to, but hardly enough time to do so. Also after years of mostly buying and listening to prog rock, I feel it's time to invest a bit more into other genres. But then and now I see a name of an unknown band on the Prog Archives and out of curiosity, I utelise the internet to quickly listen to some excerpts just to see if I am missing out on something. Mostly I notice, no, I am not missing out. Sometimes however I stumble upon something where I immediately know, I have to get this. This happened about a month or two ago when I noticed the Name Barock Project in a news snippet on PA announcing a new album coming up. I checked out the band on iTunes with their predecessor to Skyline, Coffe in Neukölln, and without hesitation clicked on Buy. I fell in love with the beautiful Coffee album and when Skyline came out, I decided I need this too. This time I also ordered the album as CD.

Skyline delivers a great sounding, fresh and uplifting melange of musical styles, genres and influences. I find the classification under "Neo-Prog" on this site a bit misleading. Sure, there are Neo-Prog elements to be found, but it's definitely not the dominating sound or style which the four young maestros deliver here, nor on their previous album. For the sake of putting Barock Project into a sub-genre box, I would rather chose "Crossover-Prog".

What is delivered on Skyline is Prog Rock with classical or barock influences, some jazz intermezzos, some hard rock, some symphonic, some folk, and neo-prog signatures. ELP and Jethro Tull influences on the band can be heard and the vocals remind me a lot of two German bands, Everon and Alias Eye. But despite those influences and comparisons the band sounds quite original and unique. The overall feeling of the music is positive and uplifting and very melodious. Although this is definitely not an album to prove: "Look, how many note we can play in a second", there is no denying that something musically mature and virtuosic is happening here. As much as the instrumental skills (and I am including the flawless vocal delivery here) are evident, the four Italians demonstrate to an almost higher level their ability of compositional skills. I cannot find any weak track here, every track in itself is a little captivating piece of art that entertains and moves me.

As far as 2015 concerned my favourite Prog release this year and I am sure in the long run, this will remain an album I will return to with great regularity as it represents a perfect example of what good, melodious, excellently performed and well arranged Prog should sound.