O ARQUITETO

After 18 years waiting for a Studio album (as told by the band itself, Wiermann & Vogel is not so much a Quaterna Requiem album) it was a pleasant surprise to notice that "O Arquiteto" has seen the light of day. It was an old project and some people can see that a few tracks were part of their DVD from 2004, including "Frank LLoyd", that seems to be a version of "Casa de Cascata". I am normally very critic about brazilian prog bands whose quantity is more noteworthy than the quality. But there are 2 bands that are really irreproachable. Bacamarte and Quaterna Requiem are the best bands ever to appear in brazilian prog rock and are in no way behind the best bands of the world. This new release shows they have lost nothing of their old shape. After I bought the CD I listened to it 4 times in a row and I still was not tired of it. There are 4 songs, but the 4th is a long suite that is in fact a reunion of songs very different among themselves mostly named after famous architects separated by small interludes whose names are materials of construction (Stone, Glass, Wood and Concrete). The album in a general way sounds pretty much like "Velha Gravura" and "Quasimodo". As its predecessors the album is very symphonic oriented, dominated by the keyboardist Elisa Wierman, who composed all the songs, with the nice violin of Kleber Vogel embelishing the music at every step (unlike Quasimodo, recorded while Vogel was pursuing his own project, Kaizen). We can see however a stylistic change in songs like Gaudi and Niemeyer, that are maybe of more recent composition, that are somewhat less melodic and rhytmically more complex. Congratulations to Quaterna Requiem for another great work. For the sake of quality prog rock I hope I have not heard the last of them.