Autumn Breeze - The Molotov Ribbentrop Pact (2015)

The third album from this band from Sweden.

The band was a quintet with a lineup of drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, samples, computers and vocals.

One guest delivered guitar solos on two tracks.

I have reviewed their first two albums in # 1 and # 2 of this blog. Two good Swedish symphonic prog albums released in 1979 and 2010. The band has released two more albums, altogether four albums, and I have both up for reviews this month. 

This album is..... a rock opera about world war II. A rock opera about one of the biggest manmade disasters ever to happen to us humans (and animals). A five years long world war which included genocides and the loss of seventy million lives. Lives lost on the most violent way possible.

The Molotov Rippentrop Pact was a pact signed in 1939 between two of the most despicable, evil men ever been alive, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Molotov and Rippentrop, the foreign ministers of Sovietunion and Nazi Germany signed it and gave it's name to this horrible pact where Poland was partitioned up by these two evil empires and Sovietunion was given the four countries around the Baltic sea; Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Litauen. A most despicable act, this pact.

So this Swedish band made a rock opera about it. It is a bit surprising that this is more or less the only rock opera about world war II. Maybe it is still too fresh in people's memories. I am pretty sure we will see a lot more rock operas about this theme in the next years and decades.

The music here is all over the place. From Swedish symphonic prog to folk rock, whimsical eclectic prog, vaudeville rock to fusion and chamber rock/RIO/Avant-garde prog.

There is indeed a lot of avant-garde prog here. There are also some catchy, quirky songs here.

 This rock opera is one hour long and it is surprisingly good. This is indeed a very weird album and one of the weirdest albums I have ever reviewed. It is still a good album. Barely a good album but the audacity of the band to go for a project like this elevates this to a good album status. 

Get this album.

3 points