For a band, whom not too many people outside of Scandinavia have ever heard of, to be releasing a fourth live album, alongside six studio albums is, well, pretty darn impressive.
Agusa are a five-piece Swedish band who perform mostly instrumental music, and their sound immediately takes you back to the 1970s. They put the lush sounds of a Hammond organ to good effect, alongside jazzy guitar and an airy sounding flute. Their influences stand out a mile and, listening to Agusa, it’s fairly easy to pick out the passages where the music’s reminiscent of bands like Colosseum or Caravan or, in particular, Traffic when Chris Wood was still in the band.
However, I listened to this album several times and, at the end, my initial impression didn’t change very much, meaning it’s all very well played and quite clever in places but, all too often, it’s overlong and involves repeating the same passages a number of times. The album consists of only three tracks, running to fourteen, twenty and ten minutes respectively. The second track, ‘Den Förtrollade Skogen’ (The Enchanted Forest), is probably the most interesting piece, running for twenty minutes and is keyboard heavy with some nice proggy touches midway through. But, overall, it doesn’t really go anywhere. Reduced in length significantly, this could’ve been a much better track.
The other two tracks, ‘Lust Och Fägring’ (Joy and Beauty) and ‘Ur Askan’ (Out of the Ashes), are fairly similar, both a mix of styles with rock, jazz and folk co-existing together, with the latter track featuring some vocals, but both are also slightly overlong.
The issue with Agusa is their music is not very adventurous. It’s all very well performed and there’s no doubt everyone can play but, given these are lengthy pieces, there’s scope to go ‘out there’, but it’s all too ‘safe’. Nothing really stands out and grabs the listener, and there’s no ‘edge’ to their music. Artists like Neal Morse play lengthy pieces, and he gives you something to hold onto, but there’s nothing like that here.
