EN REGARDANT PASSER LE TEMPS

Carpe Diem is a band that completely captures my imagination. This, their debut album from 1975, is one of the finest albums of the French progressive movement of the 1970's that I have heard. They are particularly fine in developing and aranging their material, and are superb musicians concentrating on developing the inner balance of their material and revealing a sophisticated logic in their song construction. It is essential that the listener should listen to this several times as their is a dialectical logic to the melodic and harmonic structure to the songs; building their melodic accomplishments in a continuous and evolving symphonic expression. Yes were masters of this art, and they seem to have found the secret and intelligence to propel what appears as a simple and engaging riff into a grandeloquent revelation. Instrumental interaction is astounding and each instrument is assigned a virtuous and demanding role unfolding in a variegated texture of rich harmonic colors. Of course, dynamics weren't as pronounced as in Yes, but Yes is probably the greatest prog band to set standards against and the benchmark for all progressive music: but unlike Yes, Carpe Diem were basically an elaborate space rock band; and some of the comparisons to Gong are not unfounded, with some psychedelic guitar, keyboard, and synth swirling out of the basic structure into space rock dimensions, and the saxophone resemblence to Didier Malherbe is uncanny. But Carpe Diem was a much more sophisticated band and my favorite French progressive band.