STILL THE WATERS

Celebrating my 100th review in Progarchives, I decided to check the album from the popular and entertaining PA member Epignosis, aka Robert, aka Skelletor, among others.

This is a solo project, in which Robert played all the instruments and even the singing, with the little help of a drum machine to end up a kind of demo quality album worth to listen.

First of all, I want to point that the songwriting is great. All the riffs and phrasings merge well together and flows in a natural form from start to finish. It's a relaxed journey based on guitar moods and some nice keyboard setting up the ambience of this wonderful journey. This is interesting, especially for the guitars, he is a capable player and the songwriting lies on this instrument. If you notice, all the songs are quite long, but you don't feel it, as the songs move nice and smooth and is very contemplative music. Two songs jumped out and deserve special attention: Move and Still the Waters. Both are instrumentally interesting and stimulating. What I like in any album, but especially from those songs is that you can just close your eyes and let yourself go. I'm not used to Symphonic Prog but this music can be enjoyed by anyone who cares about music, sense and soul. It's all there.

Now, there's something that in the first time took me away from the journey: the vocals. It's evident that is a personal journey and Rob took the job of the vocals, but he is not a singer properly, so sometimes you can notice when he didn't reach the right notes and that sometimes took me away right back to Earth. Now, after more listening, it has grown a lot in me, and I can't complain that the vocals were a bad choice. Even if those are not 100% accurate, I see the intimateness of the music and I guess no one else can sing better besides the one who wrote the lyrics. It's growing with every listen and that's great. Here you have a flawed album, and that's OK because perfection isn't human at the end, so it gives a lot more of soul to the music.

The production is good, maybe the drums might have more life if he might used a human drummer, but well, this is his first album and I'm sure the next would be better in the production subject. The sounds, the effects and the mix are good (not great) but I have listened to a lot worse "professional" mixing, so there's no real problem there.

What I feel is that to taking the bold decision to make a complete individual solo effort is a brave decision and he achieved in most of the album. I'm looking forward to some new material in the future, as I'm sure all the quality decisions will be improved, and it will not depend only in the quality of the songwriting as this album happen to be.

Worth the listening, I really hope more people get this album on the map because you might have missed some good material. Now you know, don't expect the flawless masterpiece of Symphonic Prog, just a great down to Earth album with a lot of sense and soul. 3 1/2 stars is fair and looking forward to a new album. Good effort Rob. I really admire your job.

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