ESCENES

GOTIC, a Spanish prog band (actually Catalan, since they're from Barcelona, where Catalan is the preferred spoken language over Spanish), released their one and only album, "Escenes" in 1978 on the Movie Play label. Released at a time when punk and disco ruled the airwaves, it proves there was still room for good prog in the late '70s. The band also makes no secret that they preferred to have all their song titles in Catalan. They performed a soft, Romantic brand of instrumental prog, dominated by keyboardist Jordi Vilaprinyó and flautist Jep Nuix, with drummer Jordi Martí and bassist Rafael Escoté. Likely because the band being Catalan, their music tended to avoid the Spanish influence (with the possible exception of parts of "Dança D'Estiu", in the flute section) like you might get with Ibio, TRIANA, MEZQUITA, GUALBERTO, etc.

The album opens up with "Escenes de la Terra en Festa i de la Mar en Calma" starts with electric piano and nice flute for Jep Nuix. Jordi Vilaprinyó then proceeds to give us some nice string synths (sounds like a Roland or Freeman String synth), before the opening theme opens up again. "Imprompt -1" is a piece that goes through a few changes, I especially love the use of electric piano in that one section. "Jocs D'Ocells" is another nice piece, with a wonderful theme played on flute, with string synths in the background. "La Revolucio" starts of with some nice, stunning flute. There are sections with the sound of marching drums, I guess they were having the American Revolution in mind, as not only marching drums are used, but Jep Nuix used a fife (you can almost imagine George Washington in sections of this song). This piece could also bring to mind PFM's "Per Un Amico", especially that song "Generale" (because it too had that similar Revolutionary War-era marching drums). These four cuts represent the first half of the album (side one if you own the LP). Unfortunately I don't feel the second half of the album lives up to the greatness. The part of the album I have the most difficult time getting through is the final cut, "Historia D'Una Gota D'Aigua". It starts off rather acoustic with a classical influence. But then the second half, when the flute and drums kick in, sounds like it gets too close to dentist office Muzak to my ears. By the way, Fonomusic reissued this on CD, and like all their reissues, had this awful habit of using this ugly frame that detracts from the artwork (the artwork to this album, done by Doreoteo Puebla, reminds me a bit of Roger Dean). Musically, I find this a nice album to have in your collection, but falls a bit short of being essential, in my opinion.