JOURNEY OF THE SHAMAN

According to prime mover and bank worker Mert Gocay listening to a Pink Floyd album at the age of 15 totally changed his view on music: he went back to the basic of progressive rock and ended up listening millions of times to the Classic Prog bands. As a young guitar player Mert loved David Gilmour and Andy Latimer their emotional sound. But in those days he had difficulties to cope with the world around him and he didn't pick up his guitar in anger, for almost ten years. But two strange events inspired him to play again. He won an electric guitar in a competition on a TV music show and shortly after he got the chance to meet his favourite musician Frank Bornemann. Mert was so inspired by this meeting with his musical hero and winning the guitar that he decided to create his own music and make an album, now inspired by Frank Bornemann with his legenadary German band Eloy. This resulted in the recording of his debut CD Journey Of The Shaman album, completed fully as analog in November 2009 at Studio 18, one of the most important studios of Turkey. The band had some troubles to release the album in first place, because nobody knew about the complex basics of progressive rock. But in the end they found a right guy to do it, after more than eight months so the release was in 2010. Nemrud played their progrock at special stages in Istanbul and it was very impressive spiritual ambiance in live shows, the reactions of the audiences were great. To anybody's surprise their album Journey Of The Shaman was sold out in short period. But then French progrock label Musea Records was interested and released the CD in 2010 on their Parallele label. And in 2014 it was even released as a LP in Turkey, one year after their second effort named Ritual and two years before their third, eponymous album.

The album contains 3 parts (between 11 and 18 minutes), each part is divided into 3 or 4 sections.

The first part alternates between dreamy and compelling interludes, the combination of English vocals with an obvious accent and the sound of the guitar and organ strongly reminds me of known German proggers Eloy (Inside- Ocean era). Part 1 ends with slow synthesizer flights and sensitive guitar runs, wonderful cosmic prog! The second part features a space rock sound that brings Steve Hillage to my mind. We can enjoy pleasant work on the fretless bass, twanging acoustic guitar and an accellaration with flashy Moog synthesizer runs and again strong hints of early Eloy. The third and final part begins with beautiful spacey keyboard layers, then many shifting moods that contain very tasteful work on guitar and keyboards (including a sensational Moog solo).

I don't consider Nemrud their progrock as very original but these musicians generate a lot of progrock pleasure. And as a huge fan of early Eloy I am very pleased that Nemrud has incorporated this German progrock legend in their melodic sound. Finally I hope Nemrud will inspire more musicans in Turkey to make progressive rock, their debut was a good start and embraced by many progheads.

My rating: 3,5 star.