Review Summary: Music As A Quest For Freedom
Days ago I wrote a review of "Om" by Negura Bunget and I stated that the Romanian scene has only one album that resists in the international decor. Now I will bring about another Romanian classic that didn’t have a resonance on the international scene, but for Romanians it represents the keeper of the keys of musical freedom in an ostracized country with a dictatorship that practically reduced the entire pop music to ballads about love, patriotism, and people’s power. I can be asked why am I choosing to review an album which I am continuing to sustain that it hasn’t any resonance in international décor? I just felt like bringing up the importance of the music as a voice in a country that spent the "golden age" of rock in censorship and obscurity.
„Cantofabule” is considered by many Romanian listeners to be one of the greatest progressive rock albums ever released. I know that it isn’t true, but this affirmation has an inner validity. It’s the beginning of the road that was followed by Negura Bunget. It is an aim for free speech in a country where the free speech has been annulled. "Cantofabule" tries to approach the mastery of celebrated progressive creations with limited means and poor production (which makes an album centered on sound structure to feel like a lo-fi effort by a long-forgotten band). Phoenix uses the ash of defeated liberty to create music capable of reaching the expressive heights of the captive self. Their music transported the listener to another world where national values represented something that enriched the simple man’s life, not a subject that oppressed the mind. The album sounds like a fight to get to the end of the tunnel, to reach the point when the art was free. I may seem subjective, but I’m saying this as someone who was raised in that forgotten country, who is aware of the terror of the regime. "Cantofabule" was the breath of air that anyone needed in that moment, an alimentation of our attempt to defy the system. This power of expression affirms over the entire course of the album and unites disparate harmonies and materializes a solid concept.
The album was the third release in Phoenix catalog (and the last before the 1989 Revolution) and the first Romanian double album. It was also the third Romanian real rock record, the previous two also being conceived by Phoenix. Playing a folkloric oriented rock, the group traced the music’s conception from Romanian medieval legends and enriched its sound with a well-defined lyricism that made possible the creation of a confident artistic unity. The style homages the Dark Ages portrayed from a Romanian peasant's point of view, the frequent choruses evidencing the essential oral character of the traditional tales.
The first moment, "Invocatie" ("Invocation"), is an occult call of the mystic figures. In an atheistic country, the idea of the supernatural, of an unknown world that looms over us, appears. Phoenix avoided censorship by using popular legends as a shield and infusing the music with a metaphysical meaning. The sound has the sobriety of a coat of arms, the mystery of a dark night in a mystic forest. The listener that knows the album’s provenience may be amazed by the harsh sonority and the mistic approach to the music’s essence, unusual for the Communist sphere. The one that views the album from an international perspective, falls in love with the dense music, and forgets the rudimentary production and the interpretative flaws. Everything in the sound’s structure has power, everything says something, even the recitative interlude conducted by the radio personality Florian Pittis has contour and a beautiful strangeness. The lyrics form an enumeration of the figures that decorate the album’s cover; the basilisk, aspidas, the magic antic giant dolphins, weaving a web that builds the entrance into another world, in a universe that constituted a sort of magic drug for the youths blocked by oppression.
Over the album’s course, the music will oscillate between progressive, folk, and hard rock, every moment having a sort of wondrous atmosphere, the substance replacing the virtuosity and the engineering quality, forming a desperate aim to to create another set of values. The vigorous chords form a ladder destined to the ascension of the man indoctrinated by the regime, a musical escape. Even if the instrumental skills aren’t totally fulfilled and in certain passages the arrangements feel out-of-fashion and laughable, the entire album sounds like a fusion destined to give the weakly evolved national décor a solid character and to free it from the damaging pseudo-nationalist touch. Like a misunderstood teenager searching for an escape from the harsh reality in a Dragons and Dungeons game, the entire cultural breath of Romania wanted to surpass the totalitarianism in this fresco of savage beasts and ancient heroes.
When the album was released, the country was delirious. Everyone searched for a copy in stores and was absorbed by the music’s polyvalence. It translated the music of Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant, and Yes into our language and connected it to the stories told by our grandmothers. Soon, Phoenix albums won’t be pressed anymore. The band fulfilled the search for total freedom: they illegally crossed the border, hidden in concert speakers. After the revolution, Nicu Covaci (the guitarist) will immediately return to the country with humanitarian aid, clothes, and food for the suppressed. Not only did the music resonate with the imprisoned Romanians, but the band still rocked through the nineties, their distinct sound being consolidated at the value of an anthem. The quest for liberty was evident all over their career, Phoenix reviving the artistic conscience blocked by political repression.
As they fiercely sang on "Invocation":
"Fie sa renasca numai cel ce dar
Are de-a renaste curatit prin jar
Din cenusa proprie si din propriu-i scrum
Astazi ca si maine, pururi si acum"
"Allow only the one with the gift to be reborn.
To rise from his ashes
From his dust, from his smoke
Today and tomorrow, from here to eternity."
With this dissonant prayer, we are encouraged to rebirth artistically in another world, in a universe that helped a nation to revive from cultural demolition. Truthfully, it is possible for any progressive listener to appreciate the unpolished splendor and to resonate with "Cantofabule". In fact, the record opened a providential dimension that can be tasted by everyone who believes in music’s power to give freedom, to pass the borders of the hermetic interdictions raised even in our modern society.
