The 15th album from this band from Sweden.
The band is a sextet with a lineup of drums, bass, guitars, keyboards and vocals.
Three guests added recorders, violin, saxophone and whistlers.
Kaipa is one of the, if not THE first Swedish symphonic prog bands to release albums. Their self-titled debut album was released back in 1975 and it included Roine Stolt on guitars and vocals. He later formed The Flower Kings who took Swedish symphonic prog onto the world stage.
Hans Lundin, the band creator since the 1975 debut album has still released albums under the Kaipa name.
The 2022 album Urskog saw a subtle but notable shift towards Fusion. A shift I did not really agree with. Nevertheless, the album is a very good album as Hans Lundin is now immune against releasing substandard and/or bad albums.
Kaipa is in short one of the best bands in today's progressive rock scene.
Then the band returned with this eighty minutes long album. An album which is a move away from the fusion on Urskog and a return to their roots. That means folk rock influenced Swedish symphonic prog.
What we get is one of the most back to the Swedish folk music roots symphonic prog albums of all time... of not the most back to the roots symphonic prog album of all time. That is what sets Swedish symphonic prog a part from the other symphoni prog scenes. In Sweden, they do their own thing.
The result is still symphonic prog. Epic symphonic prog with a mix of great female and male vocals. This is a smorgasboard of epic folk rock based symphonic prog and a no less than a great album too.
It can be argued that this is the best ever album from Kaipa and Hans Lundin. I leave that to others more-in-the-know to take that debate. I am just really enjoying this album, one of the albums of the year.
4 points
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