LINISTEA ASTUPA GOLURI

With Steve Wilson's PORCUPINE TREE now on indefinite hiatus, fans looking for a similar blend of moody Hard Rock might consider this young Romanian band instead, and especially their year 2010 debut album. The quartet's preferred brand of heavy AOR shows more than enough style and atmosphere to fit snugly in a Progressive Rock forum, and like PT presents a very tight, very together group with a weakness for minor keys and chord structures.

Despite their classification in these Archives the music isn't really very eclectic, unless you consider singing in a language that reads like bastardized Latin to be eclectic, or naming a track with the mathematic symbol for pi (and shouldn't the song be 3-minutes, 14-seconds long?) With a little effort the band could have dipped their toes into the noisy, overcrowded Post Rock pool (the AQ Facebook page actually identifies them as Post Rockers). But the music is too comfortably song-based, even with all the aggressive ambiance. The twin guitars suggest a Post Rock mindset; the occasional trumpet and theremin do not.

I'm convinced the band would be enjoying a much higher international profile if they had chosen to sing in English, but I have to applaud their provincial integrity. Music is always more genuine when expressed in its local vernacular, and wasn't Prog Rock always meant to convey a larger global perspective? Breaking down musical boundaries while blurring geographic frontiers?

Consumer addenda: good luck trying to hear this and other Alternativ Quartet efforts. The band's website is currently defunct, only four short years after the album was first made available as a free download. Sometimes I wonder if the benefits of instant digital gratification outweigh the subsequent downside: an almost equally immediate drift toward obsolescence.