KIVI VEEREB

This LP I found years ago and it has kind of stuck with me and I still bring it out to let it spin sometimes. This is the one and only album that I have of Ruja and they're kind of hard to find in Sweden. On this album, Ruja plays a melodic neo-progressive rock, here on PA it says that the band plays prog folk wich is not the case on this album. I would say their style is somewhere the two Pallas albums The sentinel and The web, with strong influences from bands like Saga, Omega, Kaipa and Progres 2. They play a very melodic straightforward rock with lots of melody, cool breaks with keyboards and guitars and have a few mellow passages within some of the songs. They sing in estonian and for an untrained ear I would say it sounds like a mix of finnish and hungarian (don't hold me responsible for that observation). Their songs are quite short wich I sometimes find is unlucky due to that some of the songs would probably have been great if they would have given them more time to develope. The recording is from the 80s with all things that follows, edgy guitars, high pitched keybards and drums that sometimes sounds like a gunshot. Although this is one of the albums that this isn't a big problem, it works out pretty well anyway when the music is interesting and it's not that bad. Many of the songs have a high tempo and it really makes me think of a combination of Pallas and Saga, the melody and the tempo from Pallas, the riffs from Saga. As with those two bands, Ruja also has influences from AOR, rock and pop, not so surprising from an album from 1987. A really interesting album that contains some really good songs. If Ruja would have been, for example, a british band, all you neoprogheads out there would have known their name. No doubt this was a high class band. 3,5 stars!