PANTA REI

A strange, obscure little album from Sweden which I would definitely agree is more of a fusion piece (with Canterbury and Zappa influences) than a psych or space rock album. A bit of a Middle Eastern influence creeps in on The Turk, but otherwise the album boasts the usual influences for an offbeat fusion band of this type - Mothers of Invention, Soft Machine, Mahavishnu Orchestra and so on. A pleasant listen which will get your foot tapping but which I can't see myself coming back to again and again. It's a shame they never made any more albums, because I can tell there's a spark of talent here, but it doesn't quite shine through.

The term "panta rhei" refers to the concept that everything flows in the philosophy of Heraclitus from Greek mythology and is also a term that has been adopted as a band name for several groups including a Hungarian prog rock band, a German jazz-rock band, a Belgian folk band and once you remove the "h" and forming the alternative spelling PANTA REI, a short-lived Swedish prog band that emerged from the fertile city of Uppsala some 60 km north of Stockholm which is most famous for being the birthplace of Samla Mammas Manna but due to the wealth of support for the arts in Sweden also produced a huge number of lesser known bands including PANTA REI.

PANTA REI formed in 1970 and released this one and only self-titled album in 1973 but failed to make an impression most likely in part at least to hosting one of the hardest to look at album covers in music history. The band consisted of Georg Trolin (vocals, harmonica), Thomas Arnesen (guitar), Leif Östman (guitar), Cary Wihma (bass, percussion), Tomo Wihma (drums), Lennart Backwall (guitar), Zeke Öhrn (bass), Gunnar Lindqvist (flute) and Göran Freese (saxophone) and performed an amazingly eclectic style that is hard to peg as each of the five tracks on this album are fairly different from each other almost making it sound like a bunch of different bands but the common denominator is the twin guitar attacks that sound somewhat like a more laid back and tripped out version of the Allman Brothers.

While the opening "Five Steps" sounds like a somewhat garagy version of 70s hard bluesy rock, the following "White Bells" adopts a slow folky approach with acoustic guitars and more earnest vocals much in the vein of Traffic meanwhile the near 10 minute "Five O'Clock Freak" takes a bit of the heavy rock guitars and mixes it with a rather Mahavishnu Orchestra style of jazz-rock that t makes things into the world of psychedelia. The lengthiest track on the album is the near 14 minute prog behemoth "The Knight" which jumps back into the hard rock guitar riffs and then proceeds to tackle a wide range of stylistic shifts that mixes Baroque classical, excellent fuzzed out wah-wah peddles and some sensual flute runs and then sprints into a sprawling jam session. The track does seem a little discombobulated as PANTA REI very much sounds like a novice act trying to learn how to juggle too many elements without mastering the cohesive effect as did their more famous town mates.

The album ends with another curve ball titled "The Turk" which mixes Turkish folk music in with hard rock. In the end PANTA REI wasn't really ready for primetime as the album comes very much across as amateur hour but does offer a lot of interesting ideas that would've been more interesting had they been gestated fully. Unfortunately this band broke up in 1974 and never had the change to redeem itself but this bizarre little artifact serves as an excellent reminder of the lesser known bands of the Swedish prog scene that haven't gone down on the top of lists from the decades of yore. Very much worth checking out a time or two but clearly not one of the more essential examples of Swedish prog. The band does have the honor of making it onto those more comprehensive various artists compilation of 70s Swedish prog but as an act in its own right is a bit underwhelming despite some excellent musicianship.