SENKI MADARA

After falling in love with the 4th Yesterdays album Saint-Exupéry álma, I started discovering the band's discography. Their 3rd release Senki madara is a very unique take on ancient Hungarian folk songs, a nice concept building a symphonic prog album around. The Hungarian folk music heritage is one of the richest collention of traditional music in Europe, thanks to Béla BARTÓK (just to name one composer who collected thousands of these songs). Yesterdays took this idea further and built progrock compositions out of these beautiful songs.

Of course we can name their influences, there is YES, GENESIS, PINK FLOYD... but the whole album has a very well defined original sound also filled with musical surprises, the richest vocal performances, tons of flutes, fretless bass too... and all of these things are served with a well recognizable Hungarian taste.

Female voices helped by multi layered backing vocals with great composing skills all over this record. The original traditional songs have that bitter-sweet aftertaste coming from few hundred years old experiences, and the music is following this mood. There are light moments (Szivarvany Havasan), reminding us to And You And I by Yes, but there are really dark things also, like Ne Mondd El where KING CRIMSON influences are shown with a drum solo and backward guitars and heavy usage of mellotron.

Senki madara is a very strong symphonic prog album, highly recommended, especially to fans of Eastern European prog. IMHO this album can be mentioned as one of the best Hungarian prog albums. Four and a half shiny stars.