CROSS

I have heard a couple of other albums by Little Tragedies, but it is safe to say that they didn't impress me nearly as much as this did. Inspired heavily by the Seventies, and by ELP in particular, this has a complexity and togetherness that is rarely displayed by other prog bands. It is full of dynamics, with gentle guitar and synthesised flute combining with fretless bass and rim shots to create a certain mood, yet at the next they can all be off and flying with every musician pursuing note density and complexity yet always making perfect musical sense. Musically it is more Western than Eastern, with just the vocals (performed by Gennady in a spoken style, in his native Russian) creating something that is obviously different.

In some ways, it is the vocals that spoil this for me, as there is so much going on that they could easily have made this a fully instrumental album, and not bothered with the vocals at all. There are large sections where the band allow themselves to fully push themselves, with no words to heard, and it is here when they fully come alive. The longest track, "The God Abandoned", is nearly twenty minutes in length, and vocals are there only for a small part of it, yet the song just flies by as the listener is taken deep into an incredible world of soaring keyboards and guitars, with majestic interplay between all those involved. Their site is available in English, and I urge every proghead to discover the joys of Little Tragedies.