VISIONS FROM THE PAST

first of all, who should buy and listen to this album? if you are, just like myself, a ProgRock fan who is interested in International Progressive rock bands from countries other than Western Europe and the US, then this is a good example of Progressive rock with Middle Eastern (precisely from The Gulf region)traditional heritage music. Also if you are a fan of the band Camel ( the famous ProgRock band from the UK)then you will like this one. this is my third experience with Osiris, I started listening to their music just 2 years ago after I read about them in Progarchives. my first encounter was with their Tales of the Divers live album then their debut album: Osiris. As I mentioned in a previous comment on Tales of The Divers album, their music is a mixture of neoprog with folky touches in the form of local traditional music form this tiny Gulf Island. the album is a concept one mainly telling the story of the little Island Bahrain and how it has lost its heritage to modern western way of life, seen through the eyes of an old man from the Island. the album consists from verses and songs and the verses are poems recited in Arabic (the local Bahraini dialect). in addition to quite decent long tracks with nice guitar and keyboard solos in the neo-prog stream. it is more or less similar to Anyone's Daughter album Piktors Verwandlungen. the album, like the tales of the divers one, has more or less the same theme and the voice of the same poet reciting his own poems. "Is it time" is very interesting with very nice lyrics which seemed much more mature than their earlier works with very nice distorted guitar solo from M Alsadeqi (but unfortunately short one). the highlight of the album is track no. 9 which is We Will Stop for noone. it starts with a very nice solo on electric eastern string instrument called Qanoon, very well composed one and then gradually merges with Al-Sadeqi's guitar and A. Aryan keyboard sounds. the introduction has some touches to a famous Egyptian tune sang by the legendary Um Kulthoom singer from the song "Inta Umry" Finally, the last track is a solid neo-prog piece. the lyrics of the album reflected the how far the band has progressed in Lyric writing over their 3 decades career. drawback about this album: production is unfortunately less than adequate which is quite a shame. nobody can blame the band for that if we look at the difficulties surrounding making such music in the Middle East where hardly ever any production company is interested in such kind of music. second: vocals are not very convincing which is again a struggle that the band longlasting memebers Alsadeqi brothers and A Aryan have suffered alot from it with frequent line up changes. I wished if all the lyrics were in Arabic that will help the band to have more options for the lead vocalists and also will give stronger sense of originality to the album. however, it is apparent that the search for a wide fan base is the main reason to find someinternational success (however if we look at the Italian Progressive Scene we find the opposite, famous Italian Rock bands did very bad when they released albums in English as compared to their original Italian language. BDMS and Le Orme are just examples). the album deserves 3 to 3.5 stars but a gave them 4 again for their determination and faith in their work and music in such difficult circumstances