Saturday 3 November 2018

Asturias - Across The Ridge To Heaven (2018)


The twelfth album from this Japanese band/project.

Asturias is Yoh Ohyama and friends. He plays guitars, mandolin, bass, keyboards, glockenspiel and synths.
He has got help from other musicians on cello, clarinet, keyboards, guitars, drums, viola, oboe, flute and voices.

I reviewed two Asturias albums for # 1 of this blog back in December 2015 and was not impressed at all by them. Mike Oldfield copycat albums, I wrote.

This fifty minutes long album still sounds like a blend of Aranis, Mike Oldfield and Flairck. Not much has changed.

Neo-classical music is what I may call it, this music.

There are some good electric guitar solos here though and the album is leaning quite heavy towards Camel and the instrumental symphonic prog tradition and scene too.

And the music actually good. That to my surprise as my two previous meetings with their music had not left a good taste in my mouth.

There is a lot of soaring, good melodies here. There are also some intricate details. This is very much likeable music to a prog rock head like myself.

This is a good album, well worth checking out.

3 points


No comments:

Post a Comment