VOICES FROM THE CROWD

Do you love FISH-era MARILLION? If so, my recommendation is simple: BUY THIS CD! Even, if you are not bound to any music genre, you may enjoy this album. It's an excellent work of Germany band. I don't want to discuss whether or not their music is "derivative". Because I believe all music is derivative. The most important thing is whether I can enjoy the music or not. Darius "Voices" is definitely enjoyable. This band proves that prog is not necessary complex composition as their music is much simpler than MARILLION.

Darius music is not exactly like Fish-era MARILLION. Their music is much more straight forward, energetic and melodic. Why do I say that? Because you will not find any guitar sound similar to Hackett (of GENESIS) or Rothery (of MARILLION). The guitar style is like a typical hard rock band, but the riffs produced are really nice. You may notice the singer, Dirk Bovensiepen, sounds like Fish but it's not really similar. The other important thing to notice is that the band has an excellent drummer Markus Arnrich.

"Voices" is a very nice, relatively medium tempo, kind of rock music. It opens excellently with children playground voices and piano. The melody is simple and relatively easy to emulate. I guess you may like this track right away when you listen to it first time. One of my favorite is the second track "First Contact" which is opened by solo electric guitar, typical to any hard rock music, but the melody is really terrific. The vocal enters smoothly " The sin of an eternal soul / Finding the graves in the snow / Lost everything in life father brother and many friends .." followed by guitar sound. Really good. You can find that in the middle of the track there is MARILLION's "At That Time of The Night"-like keyboard / clavinet sound, followed by a simple bass guitar play. It's really nice shot! I used to repeat this track over and over due to this nice piece.

"Searching" is a song with some pop touch with strong melody. The music flows nicely. "Alone" is really a mellow track with a good singing style and some sound effects to create an accentuation of the story. Nice guitar fills and piano. The melody is strong. This is the kind of melody that people would like to emulate and sing (or yell?). For example when the singer sings "Why did you run away .?" with a piece of guitar riffs. Really cool. The lead guitar solo at interlude is very nice as well. It flows then to a female voice that indicates fearness and a sort of cry for a help. "Help me .".

"Snowflakes" has a similarity in structure and tempo as "Searching" but with totally different singing style and guitar work. The melody too, of course. The nice thing about this track is that the tempo climbs to a more uplifting beat at the end with dynamic drumming.

The last three tracks of this album are really well positioned to conclude the overall album. "The Pharao's Spell (9:18)", "The Seven Signs (5:33)" and "One Of Them(6:28)" are all great tracks that usually I keep repeating again from "The Pharao's Spell" until "One of Them". The three of them should be enjoyed in its entirety as one epic track even though there are clear break between tracks. The band has brilliantly composed the three so that at the end of track it seems like something needs to be continued by the intro of next track. It seems all three are united into one seamless epic. "The Pharao's Spell" has a nice solo keyboard accompanied by lead guitar. "The Seven Signs" is an uplifting track with dominant bass playing, very nice and stimulating interlude (one of the reasons why I keep repeating). "I dream of a dancing girl ." yeah ." . crossing the line" followed by solo keyboard and then enters the interlude part where guitar and keyboard sound make up a wonderful (yet simple) melody .and the track finishes brilliantly. Followed then by a guitar sound as an intro of last track "One of Them". Excellent. "I am heading home tonight ." sings Dirk.

This band has laid a solid foundation for their musical identity and direction. I don't care is it prog or not, but it's great! Unfortunately, I ever read the news that later the singer and drummer left the band after the release of a live album "aLive from the Crowd" that included a cover for MARILLION's "Kayleigh". Some attempts were made to replace the singer with female singer who did background vocal in "Alone" (fourth track of this album). I only got 2 studio albums and one live album of this band and was not able to track the band since then. Overall, this album should be in your prog collection.

What do you think? - Gatot Widayanto, Indonesia.