RIFFBREAK - BEYOND REDEMPTION - 1999

If you see the name of the late Jaco Pastorius creep up in the thanks column then you can bet your life that this band knows what its talking about. Another great find by the Dutch Bee & Bee records label, this band might slightly resemble Anomaly with the main difference that this music contains vocals. Imagine Attention Deficit with a Red Hot Chili Pepper attitude and you're nearly there.

Opener "Denial Trademark" contains enough influences to be able to go on holiday for the rest of your lives. Obviously the Dream Theater licks are there, but there's also fusion, Echolyn, and Gentle Giant to be found here. Imagine my surprise when pure jazz piano suddenly mingles with hard-etched guitar riffs, before Jasper's fine sounding organ entertains us once again. Also enjoy the nice melodic vocal parts here.

The vocal lines in "Freeze" to me sound like a cross between Jadis, Summer Indoors and … Level 42. Strange combination, I know, but listen for yourself and you'll agree. However from a musical point of view there's a powerful hard swing part which finds its way through the wilderness of guitar solos and keyboard backdrops. "Clouds Of Oblivion" took a half a year in the making, which is no surprise once you get to analyze this little beauty. In certain parts Jeroen's voice gets close to that of ex-For Absent Friends singer Alex Toonen. Organ and guitar follow the same scales backed by some powerful drumming when interesting synths and Petrucci like guitar pyrotechnics creep in. Suddenly Hendrik Jan de Jong introduces some flamenco style acoustic guitar to steer the song into a completely different direction, before the calm is once again interrupted by fierce drumming and loud guitar riffs. To me the biggest surprise of all is when the song comes to an end, resulting in some outstanding blues with a great guitar solo backed by thrilling organ.

Solitary jazzy piano opens "So Greedy," whilst the melody seems to contain the kind of "catchy" elements thathave made bands like Kayak and Focus immortal. Once again this "kind" sidestep is put aside in favour of a royal dose of metal licks backed by a lush Arabic sounding orchestration. From a distance this sounds like Led Zeppelin only ten times as hard before it changes towards a more uptempo structure once again incorporating loads of breaks.

I have now listened to Beyond Redemption at least ten times, and time after time I detect new sounds, new details in the complex arrangements. Other than pure instrumental music, the inclusion of Jeroen Kriek gives this music an extra dimension, a dimension which could well project these flying Dutchmen into another galaxy!
http://www.progressiveworld.net


Denial Trademark opens this shortish album in the line of the name of the band: riffs and breaks. Being about the difference between being cool and being indifferent, the vocal parts are varied: sometimes melodic and sometimes groovy and funky. The music tends to follow the same route, but not necessarily at the same time. Plenty of variation and good ideas in this track. Freeze is dominated by rhythm guitars and has some meandering keyboards. The music suffers a bit from the production, but for a demo cd this is to be expected. The vocals in Freeze remind me of Gino Vannelli on his older records (era Gist Of The Gemini). The catchy chorus however takes us in a different direction. In the 15+ minute track Clouds Of Oblivion the music of Riffbreak continues to evolve, yet stay the same. Again the melodic parts tend to be a focal point for the music, the vocals still lack polish, but the essence of the music is here. Because of the variation in the music, it is hard to describe for me in the way I ordinarily do. I guess what comes closest at this point is Echolyn, both in the newness of the music, but also in their vision of an updated kind of progressive rock. Of course, the harmonies are certainly not up the level of Echolyn yet (and probably are not meant to be). In this long track there are less lyrics than on the other three much shorter tracks, so that leaves some room for the musicians to fool around in. What you get is lots of organ, some Crimsonesque guitar playing and some nice dissonants to wallow in. Contrastingly, there also peaceful atmospherics on the keyboards, friendly acoustic guitar. Some of the instrumental parts build up tension, others just tend to meander a bit, not very meaningfully at that, but always the band returns to the clear road that leads through all the compositions. This time we end with the some nice harmonies and afterwards some bluesy guitar/organ playing ('cept the bubbly atmospherics at the end). The final track on the album is So Greedy, which opens with piano and is a baroquish piece reminiscent of Bach. A slow, but heavy rhythm guitar then takes us to the vocal part. This bridge reminds me of Sinkadus.
http://people.cs.uu.nl