AKRITAS

This is kind of a strange album from a band that quietly released it and then disappeared. There aren’t too many Greek progressive bands, and the few I know of are mostly metal, which makes this an even more unusual band.

I know very little about the band, but the album consists largely of very short tracks (most of them around two or three minutes), some instrumental, with lots of rather disjointed keyboards and sporadic but pretty animated electric guitar. The vocals are Greek, or at least I assume they are, and at times the timbre and timing remind me a little of Bad Company or very early Moody Blues. The guitar work is mostly a kind of picking/strumming style, with occasional short blasts of an almost psychedelic nature. The drum and bass work is pretty muffled (pretty poor production), and not all that complex.

For the most part the tracks seem like unfinished samplers of riffs the band starts to develop, but then loses interest in. Some of the rhythms have a little bit of a Mediterranean feel to them with slow irregular patterns and slightly disjointed arrangements, particularly the instrumental “Ta Paidia” and the piano dominated “Tpagodyi”. "Ta Paidia" also has some decent syncopated drums that stand out a bit. Others like “Epietpofh” are heavy on organ, while still others feature acoustic guitar and ethereal keyboards (“To Oneipo”, “Gennheh”). There isn’t really any dominant style here – like I said, this album has more of the feel of a sampler of tunes rather than fully- developed works.

I’d like to know more about these guys, but none of them ever surfaced again as Akritas or in any other band that I’m aware of, and the liner notes on the reissued (but apparently not remastered) CD is in Greek so it offers few clues.

This is an interesting piece to own if you come across it, and I’ve seen it in used record stores on a couple occasions so the CD must not be as rare as the vinyl version probably is. Nothing special, but worth a few spins if you come across it. About 2.6 stars, so I’ll round to three and call it good.

peace