IDEACIÓN

While neighboring Argentina is perhaps the best known South American nation for 70s prog rock, poor little Uruguay often gets completely overlooked given its proximity to the megapolis city of Buenos Aires but this small but proud nation produced a few interesting acts in its own right albeit with only a handful of examples. Along with Armando Tirelli, Totem and Taiguara was a band from the capital city of Montevideo called PSIGLIO that was around from 1970 to 1975 but only released one album during those years titled IDEACIÓN although many more tracks were recorded and put out much later as archival releases. Despite its short existence, this band has been deemed one of the most important Latin heavy prog rock bands of the 70s and one of the best that emerged from Uruguay.

The band was formed by five friends: César Rechac (bass), Luis Cesio (guitar), Jorge García Banegas (keyboards), Carmelo Albano (drums) and Julio Dallier (vocals) however Albano was replaced by Gonzalo Farrugia before the band recoded their debut album. The moniker comes from the word for "century" = "siglo" and the P was added for stylistic effect. As was customary during those days, bands from neighboring nations gigged in Buenos Aires and PSIGLO played with fellow countrymen Totem at the Barock where they developed enough fanbase to warrant the release of two singles "Gente Sin Camino" and "No Pregunten Por Qué" in 1972 which led to the band's first full-length album IDEACIÓN (Ideation = to form an idea of, imagine or conceive) released on the Clave label in Uruguay. The knotty head dress that spells out the band's name on the cover art pretty much symbolizes what to expect on this one.

IDEACIÓN while hosting some interesting moments unfortunately suffers from deciding exactly what it wants to be. The first three tracks are fairly standard bluesy hard rock with prog touches from the era that sound a tad dated for this late year of 1973 when the prog scene was at its pinnacle but starting with "Vuela A Mi Glaxia" things start getting wild with freaky keyboard runs and a much more ambitious heavy rock bombast very reminiscent of early Uriah Heep but for the most part the band plays it safe with blues rock oriented tunes that add folk and progressive elements to elevate it beyond the mere status of hard rock. The longest track is "Es Inútil" that is just shy of the nine minute mark and runs the gamut of the most psychedelic tripped out space rock to hard rock and even a segment of simple blues rock and actually sounds like a bunch of separate tracks just running into each other rather than a single concept with variations.

On the original album the track "Piensa Y Lucha" ends the album sounding again like an organ drenched Spanish language of Uriah Heep with hard driving guitar riffs and even some soloing guitar as well as a major drum shebang. The 1999 CD reissue on Sondor has the extra track "Gente Sin Camino" along with a couple of alternative versions of "En Un Lugar un Niño" and "Vuela Mi Galaxia," the former of which is good enough that it should have replaced one of the less interesting tracks on the original album. It's a nice psychedelic rock track with a groovy bass and organ soaked heavy psych track with some soulful vocals. This album is pretty hit and miss but for the most part it's a really good album with a few duds that bring it down a few notches. The band had the chops to crank out some interesting experiments but was tamping down the mojo to seek a crossover appeal. As it stands this is a very good example of early Uruguayan prog that sounds distinct from neighboring Argentina but the awkwardness of how the album flows makes it sound stilted.

3.5 but rounded down