CONTRAPONTO

I am, from time to time, awestruck with some albums that I have. This is one of them.

Spin XXI is the debut of a band that is over 35 years old, hailing from the city of Niterói, on the state of Rio de Janeiro. They were pretty famous in Niterói and Rio back in their time, specially for their legendary live shows. Spin's bootlegs were known in the city's prog circles, despite not being broadly available. Only recently, however, the band had the oportunirty to record an official album.

When I first had the opportunity to buy their album (really, really cheap by the way) and listen to it, I was really not impressed. In fact, I hated the album. I did everything I could to get my money back, but because it was sold with a mega discount, one of the rules of such enormous discount was that the CDs/DVDs bought could not be returned. Sure it was kind of bad, but the album was so cheap that I just conformed myself and put that album in the shelf for a long time.

More than two years after buying the album, and still having mostly bad memories about it, I decided to give it another spin, and to my surprise, the album that once was one of my least favorite ever did not sounded as bad anymore. The features which I considered negative back then were not as offensive to my ears and some even started sounding good, believe it or not. Maybe roaming more into the world of progressive rock music allowed me to appreciate more different kinds of that kind of music, but who knows? Maybe their music just needed the right time to settle down and be propperly appreciated, like so many other albums.

One of the main problems that I had was their instrumental work. It does not fit with any specific pre-existing progressive rock pattern. They aren't similar to any big band. They are symphonic alright, but they sound like themselves, period. Also, their music is not something that you can fall in love at first sight (at least for me and for most people that I know). The mix of progressive rock, brazillian rock and ethnic music they do does not help in classifying them, making their music even more unique.

The vocals are quite different too. Firstly because they are not propperly sung. The vocalist does something between speaking words (as if he was reading a poetry) and singing. Definitely not a common thing. Secondly the vocalist's accent is really, really strong, and strong accents are never good.

Now I think that most of those issues (both regarding their music and the vocals) are actually positive. The unlikeness of the band's music makes it quite interesting to listen and the unusual vocals add another positive point in their favor. The accent still sound pretty bad, however.

Grade and Final Thoughts

Listening to this album recently has been an incredibly good positive surprise. The last place which I expected to see such a great display of progressive rock was all this time resting in my CD shelf.

If you are interested in listening to some unique progressive rock with a 70's twist, go and get this album! Therefore, the rating must be 4 stars.

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