VERBAL DELIRIUM: Conundrum (PROGRESSIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

After having offered us an enchanted parenthesis through a solo album in 2020 ("The Fading Thought"), John 'Jargon' Kosmidis comes back at the end of this year with his band Verbal Delirium with a fourth album called "Conundrum", giving a successor to "The Imprisoned Words of Fear" released already six years ago.

Verbal Delirium has demonstrated through its three previous albums its ability to evolve in a certain continuity, navigating with grace and an apparent ease between progressive rock, alternative rock and art rock. Continuing his evolution smoothly, he offers us an album where a sometimes dark progressive (VDGG and Peter Hammill are never far) rubs shoulders with more pop or folkloric themes (the instrumental 'Conundrum').

There is not a track to throw away on this record which multiplies the surprises, passing from space sounds evoking Pink Floyd (and its metronomic noise of clock on 'Falling') to a martial music, from a whimsical pop that the Beatles or Queen could have interpreted to ample and majestic themes or gothic and medieval atmospheres. The sometimes experimental side of the previous albums has faded but the music has enough relief, breaks, changes of themes to keep the listener attentive until the last note.

As always, Verbal Delirium excels in the art of alternating violence and softness, heavy riffs and crystalline piano notes. As always, Jargon's vocals are magnificent, theatrical, pure in the high notes, full of contrasting emotions. Multiplying the variations in each track and from one title to another, the band always manages to surprise the listener without ever sacrificing the melodious character of the whole to inventiveness.

Virtual Delirium is the leader of a progressive rock as it is rarely done nowadays, knowing perfectly how to measure its audacities. Sometimes crossed by pop features, often leaded by dark themes or heavy rhythms, "Conundrum" is a captivating album which brilliantly resurrects the progressive rock of the origins. - Official website

VERBAL DELIRIUM

CONUNDRUM

BAD ELEPHANT MUSIC

PROGRESSIVE ROCK