KAIPA – Summary

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7.0

• Band:
  KAIPA
• Duration: 01:19:12
• Available from: 28/06/2024
• Label:

• Inside Out

Kaipa certainly need no introduction, as they are one of the reference bands of Scandinavian progressive rock, having been formed way back in 1973 and featuring a prominent guitarist of the scene such as Roine Stolt (The Flower Kings, Transatlantic, Karmakanic).
Keyboardist Hans Lundin continues to carry on this glorious moniker with passion and mastery, together with a group of musicians who have been playing together since 2000 (among which stands out bassist Jonas Reingold, who was also in the entourage of The Flower Kings for years) and Stolte's replacement (who took over in 2007 and who, in many ways, reminds us of him also in terms of style), namely the virtuoso guitarist Per Nilsson. The line-up also includes two voices, that of Patrik Lundstrőm and the singer Aleena Gibson, which allows the band to experiment with very interesting expressive vocal solutions.
The new album, with the unpronounceable title of “Sommargryningsljus”, follows “Urskog” by just two years and focuses on a sort of nocturnal journey from dusk to dawn: the opening track “Sommarskymningslijus” in fact roughly means 'the summer light of sunset', while the title track refers to the 'summer light of twilight'.
The two tracks were then assembled into a single song, which is presented as a 'single edit' and which, in our opinion, works even better than the original divided into two; let's say that it is still a sort of representation of what can happen on a summer night, in a certain way also a metaphor for life and death.
The songs, in the best progressive tradition, are almost all very long on average and, consequently, the duration of the album reaches the maximum achievable for a CD version, even touching eighty minutes. The style is also decidedly oriented towards a classic prog rock of the golden age, with clear references to Genesis or Yes, but generally speaking, let's say that it doesn't go very far even compared to the 'cousins' (let's call them that, since the two bands have several aspects in common) The Flower Kings.
One aspect worth highlighting is that two tracks, “Seven Birds” and “Spiderweb Train”, were composed in the late 90s, in the same period as the songs that would later end up on the album “Notes From The Past” (released in 2002) and have recently been recovered and rearranged by Lundin: two truly remarkable songs, undoubtedly the most interesting on the album, which alone justify their purchase.
For the rest, the other songs, apart from the already mentioned (and shorter) title-track, mostly live on some happy intuition, like some sudden flashes of Reingold, some beautiful flute or violin inserts, sometimes even some brilliant vocal interweavings of the two singers, but where basically only the beautiful performances of Per Nilsson really stand out, with his guitar always able to suddenly light up the song, to embellish it with his masterly touch, enriching the tracks with feeling or even with power, without ever putting a superfluous or out of place note.
Overall, “Sommarskymningslijus” is an album that we could define quite within the standards of the proposed genre, but, as highlighted, it still presents some aspects that make it particularly interesting, so it would undoubtedly be a shame for any prog rock lover not to pay it the right attention.