SILENCE & BEFORE MY EYES

Walked in the music store, bumped into this sort of supermarket kart filled up to the ceiling with discount CDs, started to dig up in between the mountain of plastic corpses and came across this album by MADRIGAL (to be perfectly honest, I wasn't really sure if they were the German or the American band since I only had heard of them a couple of times). It was amusing and exciting to find a prog album among that pile of junk and wondered what a MADRIGAL album was doing there, thought it could've been misplaced but the price tag reading $2.99 told me to shut my pie hole immediately. After a couple of times of listening to it, I realized the reason why it had been tossed inside the "on sale" case displayed at the music store. I felt like I had been severely ripped off and somewhere in the depths of my mind, a little voice was claiming for a refund (I can be a cheap bastard sometimes, you know?).

Don't get me wrong, it's just that even after exhaustive sessions of listening meticulously to the work performed by the quartet from Hannover, I couldn't find a single thing to set this music off from the rest of the already applied formulas within the art rock genre, and whereas I distinguished the art rock essence nowhere in any tune or somewhere in between the few rhythmical sections some of the almost 20 minutes lasting album has got, I don't completely think of them as prog in spite of the arrangements performed in this kind of "jamming session" production. The first song "(No More) Face to Face" starts somewhat messy and intriguingly dark, mostly appealed to some underground prog metal band; the drums execution is loudly performed all along monotonous guitar riffs. When the song finally reaches out for a calm moment, there we can briefly perceive the distressed voice of Sandra WERNER trying to sing in English (almost as erratic as Laura BASLA's in "Voices Beyond my Curtain", but with an unpronounceable German accent) and find out there are other instruments besides the hypnotic guitar and the noisy, repetitive drums in the background. "Covered Sun" floats down the same stream, but it is even more accidental and it goes up and down through lugubrious guitar riffs performed by Lars TOTZKE.

There's a sudden change in the rhythmical composition of "Turn Back the Time", where the strings of acoustic guitars introduce the song to darker passages fulfilled with old-fashioned bass beats and clattering drums absurdly tuned to the mere intention of the piece. By the time we skip on to the self-titled song "Silence", it is quite impossible to tell the sounds explored here from the ones displayed on the song that had just finished to twang off. Surprisingly, it's the last song of the album where we can barely understand some words in English out of the entire record, I think that's a bonus, or whatever that means huh?

No matter how hard I tried to find a musical resemblance for you to compare the only work of this German band with something else, I just couldn't do so. There are no thinkable parameters of measurement or this sort of style a band could have for me to explain myself to you here, so, instead of going mad, my suggestion goes like this: do not buy. Whenever running into this album at some record store, step away from it very slowly. then run.

I found this album in 1998 when i was downloading songs from the once leagl and honest MP3.COM, to me findign this record was quite a shock, beacuse the songs were pretty good to be an unsigned record. This effort is quite naive, with good riffs, nice vocals and solid rock compositions, but nothing new at all. I keep this songs in my database, particularily (NO MORE) FACE TO FACE and CRYSTAL NIGHT. This is just a lost bond in a broken chain, a band that had a chance but got it lost in the sea of ignorance. Sad but nice at the end... maybe in years to come they find out that the record became a "collector's item", in the meantime try to find it.