IDEAL STANDARDS VOL. 1

Contemporary Dead Finnish Music Ensemble is a group of seasoned Finnish musicians, formed in 2000, with an aim to revive the good proggy stuff from the 80's and 90's.Among the members we find ex-Stratovarius drummer Tuomo Lassila, Alamaailman Vasarat's and Höyry- kone's drummer Teemu Hänninen, bassist Rami Talja from Qumma Connection and also female singer Katja Sirkiä, multi-instrumentalist/composer Antti Pesonen and keyboardist Matti Jalava.The material for the band's debut was recorded and engineered between summer 2000 until summer 2004 and at Mellvox Studios and at the Finnish National Opera Studio and it was finally released in 2004 with the title ''Ideal Standards Vol. 1''.

The album brings to mind the spacey and grandiose approach of AYREON or the bombastic/melodic sound of EXPLORER'S CLUB and comes like an interesting mix of Space Rock, Heavy Prog and modern Neo Prog, where the tracks are carefully measured but at the same time quite demanding.The music relies heavily upon Sirkiä's crystalline vocals, Antti Pesonen's nice rhythm guitars and intricate solos and Jalava's diverse keyboard parts.''Ideal Standards Vol. 1'' is extremely lyrical, but it contains also plenty of good instrumental ideas with spacey synthesizers, bombastic tunes and melodic textures.The tracks are not particularly long but all of them are characterized by a fine balance between vocal moments and proggy shifting moods with heavier guitar passages leaving their place to atmospheric synth/organ-based arrangements, which have both a spacey and symphonic sound.Even a couple of them are totally instrumental with plenty of atmospheric soundscapes and occasional bits of technique.Overall the music follows a rather low tempo with a quasi-dark, intense atmosphere but the proggier material reveals some strong interplays and breaks.

The band partly succeeded in producing a strong modern Progressive Rock album with both melancholic and melodic music themes.Of course this is far from a masterpiece but on the other hand I hardly believe that a prog fan won't find something to like in this effort.Recommended.

I've read that this debut took four years to make, and that the group - with quite a difficult name! - was founded to bring the progressive rock genre (the complex core essence of it) back to life after the dormant 80's and 90's. Of course they weren't alone in that attempt, nor among the very first ones, but it's true that Finnish prog releases of those decades were much more often Psychedelic Space Rock, or something else, than "hardcore" prog so to speak. CDFmE's categorizing into Neo Prog is accurate enough, but they're not half as typical Neo as especially AGENESS had been. A bit later the more Eclectic Finnish prog bands such as DISCORDIA appeared, but CDFmE is stylistically somewhere in between.

The group's mastermind Antti Pesonen is responsible of the lion's share in the whole recording process, both in writing the music (collaborating with other members to some degree) and in producing it. He handles guitars, synths, vocoder, programming and sound manipulation, plus bass on two tracks. The main bassist is Rami Talja, a.k.a. Qumma [see QUMMA CONNECTION], and the bass really can be heard loud and clear on this album. An important part of the sound is the musically educated main vocalist Katja Sirkiä who has a wide range in her voice. She resembles TOYAH, both for the voice itself and for the theatrical, at times even loonie singing style.

The music is mostly built on guitars and keyboards equally, and it gets quite heavy at times. Especially the first half of the album has a nice spirit of brave, crazy creativity but towards the end that spirit is replaced by more typical (less original) Neo Prog approach. 'The Probe' could be Landmarq as Sirkiä sounds a bit like Tracy Hitchings. The 10-minute closing track 'Stop the Machine!' is doubtlessly the most ambitious composition, but higher level of exciting originality is heard earlier on the album.

A truly noteworthy debut of pure progressive rock, even if slightly uncoherent as a whole. The leaflet tells the listener to "Look forward to Volume 2 in the near future!", but their next album came in 2009, entitled Land of Hope.