A bonus treat today: the Freia Special. Freia of course being the newly revived record label that has been dormant for some odd 20 years but is now alive and kicking.
We start off with the Felicity album from Phobos Corporation. The EP (just under 29 minutes) shows a lot of potential. Mixing many styles (gothic, power metal, progressive metal with classical arrangements, choirs, and some jazz) to deliver an enticing adventure. I was sometimes reminded of Therion, and in a good way. Would love to hear a full album of this!
Next is the celebration of 10 years of Day Six, Samples Of Genetic Wisdom (captured to survive). Day Six is saying goodbye to keyboarder Dolf with this release. It contains not only tracks from past (and entertaining) releases, but also unreleased demo’s and tracks from the time they were still called Peanuts. Their brand of progressive rock / metal is spiced up with some funk and jazz and it is a good thing some of the older recordings are now again made available.
Freia also does some exclusive distribution. Sylvium we already featured here, but they also carry for instance the now freshly remastered version of the out of print The First Run album by Dutch proggers Marathon. Excellent album by the way, one to check out for sure if you don´t already own it. Also the Impression disk by Odyssice (original released in 2000) is now available as a double disk with 50 minutes of bonus material. At the time it got rave critics from the prog community.
Worth mentioning is the concept of Freia. Most of their material is released on vinyl + CD combo. So audiophiles are sure to enjoy their catalogue… But of course anyone into this genre will find something to please the ears with this label. So support them and go check them out!
