MIKLAGÅRD

Keyboards, bass, drums trio from Sweden. You can pretty much guess the style. Luckily, they don't offer any outright plagiarism or cheesy classical covers. Unluckily, there's little here that transcends the style.

If you ignore the attempt to get all Peter Gabriel "theatrical" on "Narren", the vocals are actually quite strong. Curiously, the vocals seem to impart an Italian feel, making it sound less like ELP and more like Le Orme. If you're looking for that album that sounds like a lost Le Orme disc, stop searching for Triade and go for this instead!

Synth sounds are a bit thin on the ground, but that's only to be expected when their only synths were an ARP Pro-DGX (marginally "improved" version of the hopeless Pro-Soloist) and a Yamaha CS-50. A Moog could have beefed their sound up a good deal, as could a real Hammond organ...though for the record they push their WLM (Finnish-made solid-state Hammond clone) organ as far as it'll go. There's certainly no faulting the rich acoustic piano sounds. The solo piano spot "Mellanspel (Erotic views approaching)" is a gem.

Also unique in that "Soldaten" surely must be one of the few prog tracks around to feature a COMPOSED drum solo! Weird!