Errobi (Spain)

After the death of Franco in 75, Spain started enjoying a cultural revolution, with the youth expressing themselves in a rocky manner, but a few years behind. Sure there were some rock and jazz-rock groups that took advantage of the last years of the regime, which slowly loosening its strong conservative/fascist grip, because of tourism bringing fresh amounts of cash to a country that was isolated for three decades. But the full explosion of the progressive movement happened in the second half of the decade, and the different regions of Spain, where now making obvious references to their musical traditions. One of the regions that suffered the worst in Spain was the Basque Provinces, and as soon as the regime folded, there came about a flood of folk artists, and a few groups that mixed the folk music with a rock format. In the following years, bands like Izukaitz, Haizea, Itoiz, Itziar and Errobi all releazsed a few albums that can be regarded as folk prog gems.
Errobi was one of the longer-lasting of those groups and certainly the most adventurous or at least the widest-spectrummed. Mixing more easily straight ahead rock with their Basque folk rock, their sound was consequently different than the other above-mentioned groups. Their first two are definitive Errobi sounds, but they will record albums until the mid-80's, but by then they had substantially changed.

A fine mixture of folk, jazz, funk, blues, rock 'n roll and symphonic rock settled with euskera lyrics (which I hardly understand as I write this review). Although it has it's bombastic moments, the music is not over-complicated, making it also easy-listening for the most part (in a good way, not the radio-friendly one); also it lacks the pomp factor of many other prog acts without losing the progressive inflection of the music. The basque folk is not omnipresent, though there are certain moments (which are not so certain). The musicianship is superb and doesn't consist of " in-your-face" licks, rather than every instrument doing their rightful share. The vocals are warm and filled with inspiration, and they don't tend to be over-emotional either.
One of my favourite tracks is "Nagusiaren nigarrak", which comprises the funk, symphonic, jazz and folk in a 5 minute song, along with some rare spoken words in the middle. For the most part is a great relaxing album consisting of short rocking songs and nice acoustic ditties like "Bakea" and "Emazte", which works along a nice symphonic ambience.