Egyptian Kings
Almagest

The most recent and well-known figures from Portugal have certainly cast doubt on the quality of the Iberian country's products, consider the hated/loved Mourinho and the dribbler Quaresma. The same cannot be said, in my opinion, for some musical artists from this land. In fact, Portuguese artists I would recommend regardless of the genre are the historic José Cid (at the name José someone might have already stopped reading), Tantra, and Banda Do Casaco, among the more recent, Almuadem (not stylistically very different from the reviewed album).

There are several components of this Re Egyptian album that convinced me to listen to it, starting with the cover, which is practically a copy of King Crimson's "Islands." However, the style of these Portuguese is a sort of very "ambient" cosmic music, enriched by flautistic and guitar parts from Ludwig Arthur Blair and the Synth of Gustavo Marques.

A romantic-spatial sound appears especially in "Pale White Dot", where the slow drum rhythm and the vocals also resemble the earliest and best Porcupine Tree, a prelude to the main and longer part of the work "Low Mass Stars" where at the beginning it feels like delving into a fantastic tangerine dream (or nightmare), an assumption immediately disproved by the semi-symphonic parts that emerge, sounds in my opinion not far removed from the "Rajaz" by Camel or the less frantic Ozric Tentacles, but "Almagest" is not a work that entirely falls into Progressive Rock territories.

The subsequent tracks "Spirit of the Water" and "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," decidedly simpler to assimilate, are a sort of stylistic fusion of the more recent periods of two of the bands already mentioned, namely Tangerine Dream and Camel.

When speaking of Space Rock, it's impossible not to mention bands like Pink Floyd or Eloy, but in this case, it's a different story, as the Egyptian Kings offer sounds developed in more recent musical periods, thus it would be a bit too forced to compare them with these artists.

The album, released in 2006 by Karman Line, is the only one produced by the Iberians so far. The initial listens might feel boring (depends on the listener's mood at the moment), in fact, I initially used this album as a sort of very pleasant sleeping pill. After a few times of re-listening, however, I realized that it is a genuinely enjoyable work, only occasionally challenging, but no more than that. The rating for the album is more precisely a three and a half, it is a more than good work overall according to my tastes. For those interested in listening to this album, there is a lot to listen to on their Myspace.