Sky Architect – Excavations of the Mind (Freia Music, 2020/Galileo Records 2010)
The album reviewed here is the remixed and remastered 10th year anniversary edition of Excavations of the Mind, originally released in 2010. The album includes expanded previously unreleased versions of three album tracks.
Excavations of the Mind was the debut album from Dutch progressive rock band Sky Architect. It was an ambitious release with a mix of long suites and shorter material. The group plays mostly progressive symphonic rock with hard rock, jazz, pop and quirky Eastern European influences as well.
The highlights of the album are keyboard solos and orchestrations, some of the guitar lines and the nicely constructed vocal choruses. Sometimes the guitar strays away too much into hard rock and the lead vocals are more pop than nuanced progressive rock-style vocals. Nevertheless, it is a great debut album .
The lineup included Tom Luchies on lead and backing vocals, electric guitars; Wabe Wieringa on electric and acoustic guitars; Rik van Honk on piano, vintage keyboards, synthesizers and backing vocals; Guus van Mierlo on bass; and Chistiaan Bruin on drums and backing vocals.
Sky Architect said about the new edition of Excavations of the Mind: “We were quite astonished as to how well ‘Excavations of the Mind’ was received at the time of its release. The great response from the international community of progressive music lovers, combined with invitations from abroad to perform at some fantastic festivals and venues, felt to us like a very warm welcome to the scene. We could have never imagined this when we were working on our debut album. All we knew was that this was the kind of music we wanted to create. An album, free of boundaries of any kind, something we could embrace the way we created it.
Now in 2020, ten years after its initial debut, we wanted to do something special with this album. Although we are still very proud of the original, we thought we could create an ‘updated’ version. The album as it was supposed to be, but with the nowadays view of our sound. Of what Sky Architect sounds like. We also added three bonus tracks, to give you something extra and to get to know us even better.”