Tuesday 14 November 2017

Olive Mess - Cherdak (2008)


The second and final album from this Latvian band.

Olive Mess was a sextet with a lineup of baroque guitar, archlute, keyboards, guitars, bagpipes, percussion, drums and vocals.
A female opera singer is adding vocals to one of the tracks.

I have yet to hear their 2002 debut album Gramercy. The avant-garde/RIO label has tended to scare me off getting albums like that one. I have had Cherdak, Russian for "attic", for many years before I took the plunge and gave it some listenings and my attention.

Olive Mess was in their early life a King Crimson tribute band. That is something I can clearly hear on this album. King Crimson and Univers Zero is big influences on this album. So much that I would label them as crossover between those two bands.

Which is both a statement of fact/what I hear and a compliment.

The music here is both quirky, ecclectic and avant-garde. It is still a melodic album. The male vocals is dark and baroque. Ditto for the music too. There is a chamber rock feel over this album.

The album is almost an hour long and it is divided on four tracks of similar lenght. The music is a heady mix and pretty esoteric.

This is also a good album which would satisfy anyone into King Crimson and eclectic music. Check it out as this is a bit of a hidden gem too.

3 points

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