Review: Agnus - Pinturas y Expresiones (1980)

Another lost treasure from Argentina. Agnus released this album, its only one and it’s a shame there wasn’t any more.

The album contains 4 beautiful tracks, which bear the influence of Mia and Italian bands such as PFM. The flute has a major role here, giving this a slightly ethereal sound, which is reinforced by the heavenly sound of the female vocals. The beautiful thing here is the multiple female vocals sung together and the male vocals in opposition to them.

In the first track XXI Century the flute plays a certain tune that is then played around by the band and developed more. It is sometimes reminiscent of Camel and Gotic. As someone said, it ends a bit abruptly, and it’s a shame. However, this song contains some beautiful female vocal performance and also an enchanting flute playing. The second track is a bit rockier in nature, again with the flute setting up the scene for the rest to come and complete the picture. The guitars and the banjo here have an important role as well and they give the track a nice spacey, old and native sound as well as add the necessary rock element in this song and in the others as well. Born the day starts with some more angelic female voices. It continues as a light classic rock tune with a guitar playing a bit alone. Then the music fades away while the singer continues and the flute comes in and plays along with the singing, all accompanied by the drums that come back as well. Then start a nice vocal part of the male singer with some finally noticeable bass part and the same guitar from earlier giving its rock sound. The song goes on with some more interesting developments and suffice it to say that it does not linger on the same musical idea for too long and remains interesting to listen to for the whole of its 11:50 minutes (there is even a drum solo). A beautiful and quite original song for sure. The last song King’s History is very different from the rest of the album. It is a folk song (not Latin folk, but rather English folk), with beautiful female and male vocals and a violin that gives the song its flavour. The flute is present here of course as is the banjo. The song changes from jumpy happy tempo to a slow, melancholic mood. The faster rhythm of this song makes you move involuntarily.

Even though the songs are quite long (all first three are longer than 10 minutes), they are composed such that they flow seamlessly and without being boring at all. The only downside is the fact that I feel as if the songs are not developed enough. They could have both developed their musical ideas more and come up with others. But regardless of this, the music is beautiful and very satisfying. This may not be the most original music heard, but it sure is an excellent album, very well performed and it contains some beautiful melodies and vocal parts.