TNNE: WONDERLAND

The Secret Garden returns, hurrah! Surely 4 and The Clock... are both excellent albums (no matter if marked No Name or The No Name Experience), but they could be released also by IQ, or Jadis, or Sinister Street, or Sylvan. Well, I'm just trying to say that the two previous releases from Rukavina - Kiefer tandem and Co. lack some peculiarity/originality that made the early No Name's music distinctive. But Wonderland seems as diagnostic for the band as The Secret Garden or The Other Side. I remember effulgent 1990s when - while most of Russian prog fans of old generation were still sure that all the good music was definitively gone with the 1970s era, - a new era began. Some new vinyls and CDs came to the new- born Russian music market from Europe, US, Japan and South Korea, and many of us started to recognize a new stream in prog rock, but we associated the idea of 1990s prog mostly with Anglagard, Halloween, Anekdoten, Thule, Landberk, Malombra, Tale Cue, Devil Doll, Hecenia, Sagrado Coracao Da Terra, Men Of Lake etc. The branch of 1990s prog usually called neo-prog sensu stricto (Pendragon, IQ, Jadis etc) seemed to be more or less uniform, lightminded and having just limited capacities for growth and development. No Name was among the bands (along with Ziff, Last Turion, Sylvan and Final Conflict) who disproved that concept and clearly showed that Pendragon/IQ-type neo-prog may be as diverse and profound as, for example, 1990s Scandinavian or Italian dark progressive. And now, with Wonderland, I'm happy to see how No Name returns to their best. Not to their roots (because the album has a number of innovative moments) but to their best. To the instant complexity, inventiveness and refinement, as in beatific 1990s. The only feature of their early releases sadly missing on Wonderland is track(s) sung in Luxembourgish. Eng Oppen Dir, De Verstand (from The Secret Garden) and Mat Enger Train (from Zodiac) sound extraordinary... But I do realize that it's nothing but a fault-finding. You see I just like to listen to every prog band singing in their native language. I'm an epicure of various languages' sound. I enjoy Szallj Most Fel much more than Fly Away, you see. My apologies. It's difficult to cure, I do realize.