Gungfly - Lamentations

(CD 2011, 56:04, Progress Records PRCD 044)

The tracks:
  1- Bringing Down The Walls(7:05)
  2- White Light(5:02)
  3- Lamentation(3:18)
  4- Peace At Mind(5:12)
  5- The Game(4:43)
  6- Sleight Of Hand(6:28)
  7- In This House(5:00)
  8- And She Drives Me...(4:14)
  9- We Will Never Leave(9:38)
10- Shape Of Days To Come(5:19)

Gungfly Website        samples        Progress Records


Undoubtedly Rikard Sjöblom is the hardest working man in prog after Neal Morse. This cuddly bear of a man not only has a leading role in the unsurpassed prog rock band Beardfish, he also plays in the lovely swinging duo Bootcut and in the rock group Gungfly. In the latter he's joined by his Bootcut pal drummer Petter Diamant. Lamentations is the second record of Gungfly that deals with all kinds of misfortunes and tragedies, a real up-and-upper for the coming summer. According to Sjöblom Lamentations is more prog rock than its predecessor Please Be Quiet (2009) and it specifically contains the shorter, vocal-oriented songs of Beardfish. The careful reader will by now smell a rat as I haven't used key words like 'unsurpassed' or 'lovely' in connection with Gungfly and I'm not going to do so. Why not? Well, on Lamentations can be noticed that Sjöblom's voice has quite a few limitations and his strength is not in writing rock songs because these are all too mediocre. In short, Lamentations is a rather disappointing album for people who like Beardfish. But even on its own merits this CD wouldn't cut it as it cannot hold the attention of the listener for the full 56 minutes, which makes this quite a long listening session. The digipack contains a DVD with a concert given during the release party of Please Be Quiet in 2009. It contains several nice pieces with more prog influences and guitar solos.

*+ André de Waal (edited by Peter Willemsen)

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