OVERCOMING-UP

"Overcoming - up" is actually quite a successful attempt to modernize the earlier legacy of Roz Vitalis, only in the spirit of newly acquired experience. In my opinion, it worked more than well! The album is the most futuristic opus of the group's entire discography. In addition, the recording seems to be devoid of guitars, both acoustic and electro. For all my love for music, it is rather difficult to describe purely instrumental rock, but I will try anyway. The album opens with a rather multi-layered and powerful composition after which the album is named. The rhythm section is very typical for early Weather Reports, along which Rick Wakeman strolls at a leisurely pace. An amazing and quite energetic combination. It seems that here the group managed to combine the incompatible, or simply successfully interpret the borderline state. The next piece ? "Madrigal". I don't know if this track is a reference to the legacy of Yes, but it definitely has the atmosphere of the progressive rock of the late 70s. A lot of beauty, flight, high sadness. As in the entire album, the keys are pronounced here, which I think is not surprising. It was followed by "Journey of Possible Forgiver", although it sounds more like "The tour may not take place". This is where special effects come into play. And now the listener can hear the sound of water and birdsong, which is intertwined with percussion improvisations and keyboard inflections. In "Serene Light," the band pays homage to second half 70s prog rock with its overall blissful atmosphere in the spirit of Genesis and Barclay James Harvest. What follows, in my opinion, is the main track of the album "Thorns of Forgiving" - an ideal component for prog music, both in duration (7 minutes) and in its "filling". The powerful rhythm section and "vortex" component of the keyboards and percussion come into play again. I know what the musicians meant when they came up with the name, but it is definitely not like anything, this is an attempt to give birth to a certain avant-garde style of its own, at the junction of musical trends. The album also has in its arsenal the "mini-opera" "Claws of Winter (Blizzard Paths)" - which is better to hear at least once in order to get the most complete picture of the boundless possibilities of this group. And the disc closes with "Overcome by Uplift" - a quiet, almost cosmic lullaby, directed somewhere boundlessly upward. Particular attention should be paid to the cover of the disc. Strange, but true: this is just an upside-down photograph of the "Big House on Liteiny" in Saint Petersburg, taken with a film camera. In the early 30s in the USSR, the building of the OGPU-NKVD ? the secret police organization ? was located here; this was an agency of special extrajudicial executions. And it is not clear why the leader of the group, Ivan Rozmainsky, being a religious person, combined this photo with religious symbols. And, nevertheless, we have one of the successful and coolest covers in the history of modern Russian prog-rock (created by Vladimir Kabanov)! In the best traditions of the 70s, it is "served" to the listener without any additional identification marks.