CREATURES

Although the individual compositions (including the very odd third one) are ranging from good to excellent "Creatures" seen as an album overall appears a bit too incoherent, unaccomplished and immature in some way. Either this is signalling that the band is still searching their own style or it's a sign for some "post-modern" tendencies to mix all sorts of music styles relentlessly shown by some other bands as well nowadays. Anyway they're offering here a quite enjoyable mixture of funky jazz-rock, retro prog in the vein of ECHOLYN, mainstream prog aka KANSAS,humouristic odd Avant prog sounds and some reminiscence to ZAPPA (which is not that much surprising since they started as a Zappa-cover-band).

"All This Time" is opening with strange odd samples but then developing to a rather driving and catchy prog song dominated by guitar and bass. Although being a bit "pop- ish" (meant in a more positive way like accessible) it's really a very good song. The title track is a very versatile composition having multiple parts starting from grooving jazz- rock, one reminding to GENTLE GIANT and a more balladesque one. In its middle part we get Mellotron, Marimba and violin, sometimes a bit odd but played very fluently and wonderful. "The Celestial Metal Can" might seduce to press the skip button on first spin, really a strange piece and hard to be enjoyed. The first three to four minutes actually consist of some cacophonic electronic sound samples mixed with distorted guitar, before something like a melody is starting to develop slowly, some sort of odd and bumpy latin rhythm using dissonant sax solos, strange voice samples, bits of sitar and banjo on top of a repeated Marimba loop. The final part sounds like classical chamber music for strings. Overall I wouldn't call it necessarily bad, but even after a couple of listenings I'm still not able to really enjoy it. But the remaining two tracks are really compensating for this loss of enjoyment. "Gagutz" is an all instrumental jam-alike jazz- fusion piece with some amazing solos by guitar, violin and trumpet. Really an excellent track, but highlight of the whole album is IMO the last one "Waterfall Carnival" with more than 21 minutes full of awesome prog music. Consisting of several instrumental parts which are quite different from each other and despite it's in a more gentle vein it never becomes boring at any point. The beginning is rather unspectacular with soft flute sound but in the following they included every now and then some excellent odd ideas. At around 16:00 there is a wonderful part with acoustic guitar. Really an awesome closure for a very interesting and versatile album.

SUMMARY

"Creatures" is not my favourite album by them but nevertheless it's an excellent one and certainly worth for 4 stars. Highly recommended for any prog fan who doesn't mind some more incoherent and highly versatile albums.