LAS HADAS NO VUELAN MÁS - II. EL AGUA DE FRENTE

South American country Colombia hasn't given very many prog bands in all time. There are something like a dozen Colombian bands in PA, many of them Prog Metal. JAÉN KIEF from the city of Medellin was founded in the late 90's and their debut album was released in 2003. As the title suggests, this Spanish-language album is the second item of the pair of albums, and sadly it's also their last one. I haven't heard the debut, but the general opinion here seems to prefer this second album. There must be an interesting lyrical concept, perhaps a dystopian one to suit the rather dramatic essence of the music, but due to the language barrier I'm not trying to comprehend it.

Considering the feminine, fairytale-like sensualism of the cover and the fact that they have a female vocalist on board, in the end the music gets more masculine and less delicate than I was hoping. The opening track 'Invierno en Atlantis', being basically an instrumental, features plenty of wordless singing by Sol Beatriz Jaramillo. Her voice is very good, and the seven-piece band nicely combines electric and acoustic instruments such as saxophone and flute. The first proper song, pretty dramatic 'Religio Medici, 1643' adds the male vocals while Sol Beatriz is still heard too. Terrific flute parts and fine guitar playing. The keyboards department mostly relies on a relatively uninteresting background carpet of synthesizers instead of a pianistic/melodic approach. The guitars are generally used more diversely, and the acoustic guitars, alongside the flute, also give the music some folk colour.

The latter part of 'El Hilo del Insomnio' features the bright piano melodies I was missing, and the duet vocals are shared equally between the man and the woman. A great extra characteristics on this album is the way the tracks follow each other seamlessly. 'Hombres des Hielo' has an ELOY-like atmosphere, thanks to the impressive synth playing. At the first listening I thought that the album goes a bit downhill after the beginning, ie. gets more masculine as the vocal parts are mostly sung by male members (for example the tightly rocking track 'Tus Suenos de Tul' approaches macho-like Latin spirit I'm not keen on at all), but fortunately Sol Beatriz is heard throughout the album, although too rarely as a primary vocalist! Yes, the first half of the album is admittedly better, but all in all this is a sonically rich and exciting, dramatically built opus definitely worth checking out if you are generally interested in Latin American prog.