ENTERING THE SPECTRA

Karmakanic´s first release is very interesting. The group not really a group yet, but a side project of The Flower Kings bassist Jonas Reingold, with several musicians helping out, most of them from TFK itself. I bought it as soon as it was out since I was in my deep Flower Kings phase at the time. I remember not liking it much. In fact I gave this CD to a friend not too long after that and just forgot about it. Now I see I was a little too hard on it. And after hearing their excellent third album, the magnificent Who´s The Boss In The Factory?, I decided to give another try.

Well, after repeated hearings I still think it does sound too much like something out of TFK: after all, five out of the eight official members are from TFK, including leader Roine Stolt (although he does sing two leads he does not appear on all tunes). The title track is a good exemple of one of those epic songs that made the swedish band so famous. It is by far the best song of the entire album and one hell of a great prog tune. the remaining material is not that fantastic, but it is very good anyway. Of course you´ll have the inevitable bass solo and some self indulgent sutff here and there, but I found them to be rather limited, so I guess I regret giving my CD away. And I have to admit Reingold did a fine job as a songwriter in this style. Some of his past hard rock roots also shows in some spots giving this work the necessary different element that set them away from being just another TFK copycats.

Conclusion: if you like the TFK, chances are you´re gonna love this CD. The fact that Karmakanic dind´t have a individual personality yet does not mean its music is not powerful and devoided of many qualities. In fact it has enough strong tunes to even compete with some of the CDs TFK were releasing around that time (like Rain Man and Adam & Eve, for exemple). My rating: very hard to decide! Something between 3,5 and 4 stars.