THE FIRST DAY

"The First Day" was a real turning point in Karcius's career, since with the entry of Sylvain Auclair on bass and vocals, they left their instrumental stage behind to focus on sung songs.

And the result was for my taste the best they did to date. They still needed to reach the maturity that they have achieved in the later "The Fold" and "Grey White Silver Yellow and Gold", but things were pointing pretty well.

Here we still have compositions quite anchored in jazz and it shows that some of them were intended as instrumentals before the voices were added, but the result is still quite stimulating for a transition album.

Recommended!

Best Tracks: Rest My Head (I like the string arrangements), The Word (a very powerful opening that then gets a little cloudy in the jumble of instrumentals) and Water (I especially like the Hammond organ solo and the good and heavy instrumental section after that)

My Rating: ***