ANABELAS

Bubu

Eclectic Prog

4.26 | 658 ratings

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Sinusoid
Prog Reviewer

ANABELAS is an album where you either need to be very persistent or pretty lucky in order to obtain. I fell into the latter category here.

Bubu is a rare kind of group that could only poop out one album in their lifetime. Judging by the markedly positive reviews on this site, Bubu made that statement well worthwhile, and I can't do anything but agree.

It's got that ''Close to the Edge'' type of structure with the big epic coming first and two shorter songs right after, but in my mind, the comparisons to Yes stop there. One big thing to understand is that the group is sans a keyboard player minus the piano played in ''Suenos de Maniqui''. To compensate, there's one violin, one saxophone, and a flute player (possibly the three favourite non-traditional-rock instruments of the prog world) that mesh together quite well. There's a spot in the middle of the big epic where each of the violin, flute and saxophone (that order) takes their turn going beserk only to produce a calm immediately thereafter.

The only unfortunate is that while the compositions are well thought-out and well executed, it's hard for me to attach certain themes to certain pieces unless I've bashed at it fifteen times consecutively. There's not much of ''El Viaje de Anabelas'' that sticks out long after I've listened to it other than a Kansas-esque march in the middle (but done with enough of a twist to make it sound original). ''Suenos de Maniqui'' is a slight exception to this as the controlled chaos can go from tantalisingly soft to crashingly brutal (not in a heavy metal context) almost poetically.

It's had several comparisons to the Italian prog scene, but I cannot stamp an opinion here merely because I have not enough experience with the RPI scene to tell you. It's crazier and not as symphonic as your traditional output of prog bands like Genesis or Kansas but not as off-the-wall compared to say Koenjihyakkei. If you're sick of the big name prog bands but are too timid to really branch out, this will fill that void.

Sinusoid | 3/5 | 2009-12-12

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