Band: Sky Architect

CD Title: “Excavations of the Mind”

Label: Galileo Records/ProgRock Records

Label Website: www.progrockrecords.com

Release Date: 2010

The Netherlands may not be a very big place but over the years they’ve given us more than their fare share of interesting progressive rock acts. Well here’s another one to add to the list, a band called Sky Architect. This is a new band, a quintet made up of Wabe Wieringa (guitars), Chistiaan Bruin (drums), Rik van Honk (keyboards, backing vocals), Tom Luchies (vocals, guitars), and Guus van Mierlo (bass). Musically the band set out to create music that honors the past while being very modern. Their first CD is entitled Excavation of the Mind and for fans of symphonic progressive rock this disc is a winner.

The first track was all it took to hook me into the band’s musical web. It’s a 4-part epic entitled “Deep Chasm” [19:10] packed with vintage keyboard sounds like Mellotron. The composition essentially covers the map with musical change-ups, recurring musical themes and musical gymnastics. The second part of this epic features a wonderfully dramatic musical crescendo that repeats just enough times to make you want to go back for more. Musically the sound here is a lot like Beard Fish mixed with Spock’s Beard. The compositions change direction on a dime and go from dramatic to strange or rocky to comic as smoothly as silk. While listening I kept asking myself what is it about the music of Sky Architect that gives it such a different tone and one of the things is that band rarely are playing in four/four time, all of which makes the musical change-ups sound that much more dramatic. Take a song like “The Grey Legend” [12:11] for example. It starts out with some loose slappy guitar string sounds which then launch into a nice aggressive distorted guitar riff with some brilliant Hammond organ underneath. At the one-minute mark it all changes, gets slower and the piano comes to the fore as lead. Thirty seconds later it changes again and the vocals come in, all melancholy with Mellotron strings providing the background layers. At the 3:30 mark all changes again and the song gets into an up-tempo groove with some nice layered guitar soloing and more Mellotron string support, then at the five-minute mark we slide into a kind of a Beatles’ influenced “Day in the Life” segment before going back to one of the opening riffs. And we’re not even half way though the song! This is brilliant stuff.

Sky Architect have been working on this for the past two-years with the goal of, as they say in the liner notes, of making sure that “symphonic rock will remain to earn itself a place in the 21^st century.” To my ears Excavations of the Mind hits all the right notes both nostalgic and modern in the same breath. This is a stellar set of symphonic compositions that I highly recommend.