During my weekly surfing on the Spanish progressive rock sites, I discovered this wonderful album by UNOMA. The prime mover and musical brain is guitarplayer Fidel Vazquez. He has a beautiful, very warm sound and his compositions are varied featuring lots of good musical ideas. Let's take the album song by song.

1.- Croma (5:42) - This is a tasteful arrangement with a pleasant mellow atmosphere featuring twanging electric guitar, piano, a synthesizer solo and beautiful, very sensitive electric guitarwork in the vein of Andy LATIMER from CAMEL.

2.- Black Hole (8:50) - The first and final part contain a slow rhythm delivering sensitive, howling electric guitar soli and an organ solo. Halfway there is a break with sensational synthesizer flights and a fiery, MIKE OLDFIELD inspired guitar solo.

3.- The Bird (4:32) - Great electric guitar overdubs featuring twanging guitar and slightly distorted soli.

4.- Magic Tour (6:10) - It opens with a slow rhythm delivering soaring strings and spacey synthesizer sounds. Then a lot of shifting moods and very spectacular guitarwork (jazzy, heavy riffs and howling soli) and sensational synthesizer runs.

5.- In The Name Of God (14:52) - This epic composition contains English vocals (a kind of soulful version of Peter GABRIEL) and has many fluent changing of climates, from warm an slow till bombastic featuring pitchbend-driven synthesizer flights, fine piano – and organplay and sensitive electric guitar soli (with echoes from Andy Latimer). The final part has a fiery, very moving electric guitar solo.

This showcases the great skills from Fidel Vazquez, a very talented guitarplayer and composer. If you like CAMEL, MIKE OLDFIELD and the music of early GANDALF this CD deserves a chance.

Erik Neuteboom

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