NOVÁ SYNTÉZA 2 [AKA: NEW SYNTHESIS 2]

Not really a follow-up to the first Nova Synteza (New Synthesis) until the last 5 minutes of the opening epic. On the major part of he side-long track the orchestra is just supporting the band with brasses and the song is mainly rock-blues. The brasses give it a retro flavor so that it seems coming more from the 60s than the 70s. In the last five minutes it drastically changes and turns into an excellent orchestral jazz before coming back to the original rock theme for the last conclusive minute. So 3/4 of the track are Symphonic Prog and only the last quarter is JR/F.

Also the second track hasn't much jazz while the blues of the debut is completely gone. This is a progressive song on which I hear connections with some RPI of the same period or earlier. The 7+ chords around 4 minutes remind me to Camel (Song Within A Song). Then the rhythm increases, odd signatures appear util the vocalists are back to finish the song.

A 3 minutes interlude, but not a filler comes next. An impressive vocal performance. It makes me think to the Banco, again RPI of the 70s.

The closer is another quite long track of about 10 minutes. Not easy to describe, it has a retro flavor like the rest of the album and this time even without taking the brasses into account. again 7+ chords passages remind to Moonmadness, just the sound of the guitar is different. There's more improvisation in the guitar solo respect to Latimer's stuff. Later the main theme of the second track is "resurrected" like they are informing us that this is a concept album and the separations between the tracks are not relevant. The second guitar solo on the uptime section is between Latimer and Santana.

It's an album that marks the beginning of a transition for this band and has effectively a value independently from the context. It probably doesn't reach the excellence, but it can stay in any prog-rock collection. In order to avoid decreasing the overall rating of this good album I round up its 3.5 stars to 4. "Good Addition to any..." would have been more appropriate, but a sentence like this is not in the guidelines.

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