More progressive rock for readers to get their teeth into, Rikk Eccent delivers an album containing seven songs and a brief intro and which is tantalisingly described by the accompanying biography as being like “Steely Dan songs played by a guitar-driven Depeche Mode, produced by David Gilmour and mixed by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent”. The project of Kimmo Salmela, the strikingly talented keyboardist/guitarist who has contributed greatly to the work of many a Finnish artist, ‘The garden of delights’ is an intelligent, experimental work that provides listeners with a challenging, often beautiful experience to which they will wish to return on a regular basis.
Opening amidst echoing vocals and with a pastoral feel, the title track is but a brief introduction to the delights that await, rapidly moving from acoustic lament to the Iron Butterfly loving monster that is ‘the road to the oblivion’. With awkward, syncopated percussion, multi-faceted nuances that place the music somewhere between ‘pretty hate machine’-era NIN and King Crimson, it’s odd record that sounds like it was recorded in the 1980s by a pair of time travellers with access to a library of music from the early nineties and a monumental bag of weed. With a chorus that belongs to Blood Red Shoes via the Yeah yeah yeahs and a verse that is straight out of ‘Music for the masses’ as recorded by David Bowie, it’s an oddly beguiling, sometimes difficult, always impressive track that requires several listens before it even begins to make sense. Kimmo roars away on the guitar like a cross between Reeves Gabrels (still one of the most underrated guitarists of the late eighties/early nineties music scene) and Robert Fripp and the music ebbs and flows across a range of daring pastures, sounding as if it was beamed in from outer space by aliens attempting to recreate human music by absorbing the complete top 40 from 1989. With hardly a pause the music segues into the oddball pop rock of ‘freefallin’, the sound of ‘Scary Monsters’ re-recorded by Tears for Fears. The strangeness does not stop there. ‘Lone Kid’ takes Radiohead and Deep purple and has them harnessed together to record a hybrid of Krimson-esue folk and Genesis progressive, as if things weren’t odd enough already. That it works so well is rather more of a mystery, but work it does, and if you’re not absorbed by this point then clearly progressive rock is not for you.
Still making an effort to draw upon every prog band in history as a form of inspiration, ‘money pie’ takes the majestic might of Pink Floyd and mangles it in a blender with the gloriously OTT guitar and synth work of Jeff Wayne, only to occasionally drop into stripped down acoustic lament in case it all, you know, gets too much. ‘It will all make sense in the end’ (surely the album’s unofficial title?) features a heat haze of noise and echoing guitar before stepping into mid-eighties Genesis territory complete with Colin Edwin on bass. The album concludes with its highlight, the atmospheric ‘Nexus’, a trip-hop referencing moment of calm and reflection in the wake of the musical chaos the band have spent the previous forty minutes unleashing.
All in all ‘the garden of delights’ is a deeply intriguing, multi-layered work that draws widely upon the music of the last three decades, pilfering whatever element most aptly fits the mood of the song irrespective of whether it belongs to prog, jazz, industrial, trip hop or indie. Such a musical magpie approach has its risks, but these are neatly side-stepped for the song-writing here is sublime, with each track carefully built up like a detailed technical drawing. Moreover the album as a whole has a surprising sense of coherence that sees the tracks ebb and flow across the record’s fifty-minute run time without losing focus. ‘The garden of delights’ is deliciously different, complex and yet accessible, beautifully played and perfectly produced. It requires patience and perseverance but the pay-off is a record that will stay long in your dreams and which will inspire you to greater heights of innovation if you are of a creative bent. It is a beautiful, wonderful work that shows just what it is possible to do when inspiration and talent come together so perfectly.
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