SUMMARY The Russians with their fourth album. This one, and likely enough the others too, are for sale at CD Street. THE MUSIC Trans Aviation Pilots is Russian band Romislokus's fourth album, and could be considered a more or less logical sequel to its predecessor All Day Home. The album contains eleven songs which are mostly pop oriented with the slightest of progressive influences. They could be best compared with Tony Carey's solo material, although a bit less smooth. One might also consider similarities to such progressive pop bands as Gazpacho, but Romislokus is too uneventful to fully stand up in that comparison. Come Tomorrow is a little different, less oriented towards the basic song structure and with some twist in the use of both voice and instruments. Money's use of tubular bells during the break has a nice flow to it. Positive surprise is that the English vocals are quite expressive, often a problem with non native speakers. They are rather accented though, and grammatically the lyrics aren't exactly up to scratch either. Apart from that the tracks in Russian (the album contains both tracks in Russian and in English) do seem more appealing, well rounded, complete than those in English. As with the previous album, the band use only normal pop instruments (barring the occasional cello), thus missing out on the somewhat ethnic feel of the older material. I keep feeling that that ethnic feel was the earlier band's main appeal. CONCLUSION Trans Aviation Pilots isn't a bad album, actually the tracks are sort of decent. However, the tracks are mostly background music, whilst their vocal nature would suggest otherwise. Only occasionally, with such changes as mentioned before, does the music pull some attention to itself. These moments are too few and far between to carry the album. |