KALAHEN

Strictly from memory, I think this one never got a release at the time. These two albums have charming art cover (although somewhat naive ) that suits well the music . The players (all from the city of Mons) were a little too tender to attack this Tolkien world with full blown prog so they sound rather proto-neo-prog. This second album is however not very well recorded as (again I amnot sure of this) they were only demos.

Dragon is not to be mistaken for the New Zealand group that released a few albums , some of those early ones could be interesting to progheads.

This intriguing album was released posthumously from tracks recorded at the practicing room. So the record appears more like a good demo released on vinyl than a fully produced album. I still think it's a quite interesting piece of work, the recording method revealing the raw realities of the music creation instead of polished sonic contructions. I think the music is not very accessible though, due strange moods, contrasting changes and striking fuzziness. But there are great musical passages to be found from the songs, if one has the mood to listen the album through. There are lots of mellotrons, flutes and saxes on the instrumental basis, and some incoherent solutions create an interesting sense of surrealism, deepened by crayon colored fantasy sleeves. The B-side of the LP felt more interesting to me than the first one, being a home for two longer songs. "Red Light" starts the side with a beautiful, calm and lyrical piano movement, which transforms to a chaotic verse with heavily distorted guitars and screaming vocals. These two elements are tied together with mellotron and trumpet dominated parts, and they form a personal, weird and really menacing track. "Kalahen" runs for eighteen minutes, but is quite unbalanced for an epic symphonic piece. Still there are some really great musical moments on it, and the mixture felt to me like a psychedelic symphonic expressionism. The chaos seems to rise from strong, uncompromising notes of long duration, and the sounds to which they have been dressed on, not from quickly shifting directions on rhythmic levels like I felt occurring on Van Der Graaf Generator's "Pawn Hearts". If you are interested in rarer continental euro-prog, musical adventures are at your goal, or you should collect underground albums, then I would recommend this LP to you warmly.