Ritual
The Hemulic Voluntary Band

I am forced to download them to listen to them, but I would gladly give them a hundred bucks to keep them “working.” I ruin an art that I am unable to support, and I take it as a tragedy.

"Dangerous Journey" is one of those pieces that I would put on loop my whole life for the ears of Petrucci, Myung, and Portnoy and their ilk, with various voice interludes that recite: How to write a Prog Track, How to play a Prog Track, How to Sing a Prog Track.

The aforementioned suite alone is worth the Hemulic journey. 26 minutes between Folk, Electro, Psychedelia, an extraordinary amalgam, with pleasant (especially at the beginning) Easy listening cadences. It never wants to be ostentatious avant-garde - and in fact it isn’t - the orchestra “limits itself” to narrating without any instrumental overpowering, everything follows with expressive emotion in the harmonic touches that are never cloying or out of place. If it weren't for the somewhat clarifying mix, it would seem written on the spot, music as an environment that encapsulates the events, synesthesia towards what one feels in that particular place or particular moment. It turns into an enchanting fairy tale, everything brings me back to the in-game soundtrack of FF VIII, do you remember? Then well, I might be mushy and sentimental, but the piece struck me deeply, maybe in a year I'll have a faded memory of it, but now it's a real butterfly in the stomach; can I afford lapses in style during a period of infatuation or not?

To you the rest of the album, I hope the beginning is enough. Our artists do not even pale when dealing with the crunchy (Waiting By the Bridge,) or refined harmonic counterpoints (Title Track).

Let's hope to keep dear Scandinavia in this glory for a while longer, it might be the polar cold, the reputation of the most depressed people on the planet, but it’s a nest where I almost always find warmth.

rating 4.5