QUANTUM PHASE TRANSITION

This year, I've fallen hard for the new wave of Spanish prog, a full-blown infatuation fueled by the resurgence sparked by labels like AmarXe and Astronomy Recording Music. Just recently, I dove into Malabriega's Frippada Andaluza, a stunning gem that quickly earned its place in my collection. Quantum Phase Transition is the kind of album that rips open your lazy prog-fed frontal lobe and pours in Andalusian lava until you're baptized in a genre stew thick enough to drown Rick Wakeman and wake him back up just in time to slap Jordan Rudess. Ekzilo, these mad Spaniards, don't play progressive rock, they airlift it into their own cultural hurricane, spin it around flamenco style, throw in some Opeth growls just to mess with you, and then lovingly hand you a rose. With thorns.

Let's get this out of the way: I haven't heard their first album. Don't need to. This new one stands on its own like Gaudí on mushrooms. It's a half-metal, half-mediterranean, all-in spiritual manifesto by guitarist José Ruiz, whose playing doesn't so much solo as breathe. His lines are sinewy, coiled, tasteful, and absolutely capable of biting your ear off if provoked. And Paula Rodríguez on keys? She's like the ghost of Chick Corea and a warm summer dusk in Cádiz had a baby and let it loose on a stack of analog synths.

Opener "Patibulum" kicks the door down with one foot in Riverside's prog-metal elegance and the other in a death-metal gutter. The harsh vocals come in like a spilled ashtray across a silk tablecloth. Why? Who knows. Maybe it's a dare. Maybe it's genius. Maybe it's a mistake. It doesn't matter. The music moves forward like a thoughtful machine with heart, sharp rhythms, shifting moods, a musical terrain that's tectonic rather than flashy. Then there's "La Fábrica de Barro", what a name! Sounds like an arthouse film about clay workers on strike. The music matches the imagery: brisk, Mediterranean, sculpted. There's a Spanish guitar line in here that could make Robert Fripp drop his pick and just listen for once. "Dunas" follows with a desert-trek rhythm and a kind of sun-drenched precision, blending symphonic flourishes with melodic bursts like it's no big deal.

But then "Brujería". Man. THIS is the track you play to convert someone. There's a moment midway when everything stops for a Spanish guitar that doesn't show off, it remembers. It knows. It testifies. The rhythm section is locked in tighter than a dictatorship, and the whole thing spirals into this final flamenco-flavored finish that's got more soul than half the jazz-fusion scene combined.

And "Evolution"? Eighteen minutes of pure cinematic grandeur. It's not a song, it's a damn odyssey. Acoustic guitar solos that feel like blood rituals, keyboard textures that whisper and then roar, bass and drums galloping like Andalusian stallions through time signatures that shouldn't work but do. The growls return (briefly, mercifully), but by that point you're too deep in the trip to care. There's even a jazz section that sounds like Soft Machine reborn in Seville with Miles Davis feeding them absinthe.

The closer, "Epilogo", is just a minute and change of solo guitar but feels like a sunset after the war. A perfect, humble comedown.

So yeah, Ekzilo may have been quiet for five years, but this album? It screams. It sings. It matters. Quantum Phase Transition is one of those rare progressive albums that's not about showing off but showing up, for the music, for the feeling, for the damn soul of it all.

Recommended for: Anyone who's ever air-guitared to King Crimson, cried during a flamenco solo, or wished Tool had a Mediterranean cousin with better manners and a bigger heart (Jose Zegarra, Progressive Music fan. Filmmaker+Executive Producer of the Romantic Warriors documentary film series).

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