MESSAGES FROM AFAR: FIRST CONTACT

To begin with: amazing, fantastic, absolutely superb musicianship of the guitarist. This is the first impression from the album. The music bears a faint resemblance to Space Circus and maybe also another Japanese prog fusion band, Kennedy. Unfortunately, when they sing (what occurs, let's say, not too often), they sing in English. There's nothing to be done, I strongly prefer native languages, my apologies. However their English is good (I asked specialists). Not sure that Karfagen provides a correct idea of Ukrainian prog scene/school as a whole. In other words, not sure that Karfagen is representative enough for Ukrainian prog. But anyway this band is very interesting. Golden Fields of Rye reminds me not of real fields of rye (which, I believe, are indeed as golden in Ukraine as in my home village near Borovsk) but rather of water-flooded green fields of rice in Karakalpakstan (before the shrinking of Aral). The final 16-minute track is expected to be an epic but in actual fact breaks the prog standards for constructing epic suites appearing to be no more than just a very long - and very enjoyable - instrumental piece.