THE COSMIC REMEDY

THE COSMIC REMEDY is a great project with members from THE SAMURAI OF PROG, YESTERDAYS, YACOBS and TABULA SMARAGDINA. Somehow, the fact that the members haven't met yet in person, it makes the whole thing very interesting to me. According to their website, everything had been recorded at home in Finland, Romania, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Brazil. But there must be something important in common to tie the album and the musicians together: the love of THE BEATLES and early progressive rock. This album has all the sweet melodies and song structures from the sixties, well written multiple vocal harmonies, both male and female voices and this makes this album very colorful. All the songs were written with good taste. The first part of the record feels like symphonic prog to me, YES and GENESIS comes to mind. The second part is much more like THE BEATLES but there's vintage stuff like SERGIO MENDES and THE BYRDS too (even a little bit of jazz too maybe). The third Suite is the female part of the album, RENAISSANCE and Hungarian band YOU AND I comes to mind, but I feel a strong SUPERTRAMP and YES influence here. You may find that structurally this has nothing to do with progressive rock, but there are nice MOOG sounds and MELLOTRON passages, FLUTE and instrumental tricks that make these songs very enjoyable for fans of melodic progressive rock music. The last part of the album shows THE BEATLES influence again (ABBEY ROAD era). All in all this album has much to offer to those who like the bands mentioned above. No long solos, no big epics here, but nicely crafted intelligent songs, beautiful lyrics (all in English) and amazing clear sound. Someone mentioned before that this album sounds very good, very dynamic. I agree, and I'd say that it may be intentional, their website shows that the dynamic sound is very important to these guys. A refreshing but vintage sounding debut from THE COSMIC REMEDY. I am looking forward to hear more about this project in the future, but with a better looking CD cover.... Four and a half stars.