DisAgreement Online

For more than twenty years, Vespero from Southern Russia have been busily releasing albums. They must have well over thirty releases in their discography by now, although there's usually a live record or a collaborative effort between regular releases. Their last album De Ludo Globi from 2023 was followed by a joint album with Flux(us) Duo and a live rendition of De Ludo Globi, giving the impression that over the past two years, the quartet has been focused on majestic twenty-minute epics. Imagine my surprise when I first listened to Lost Stories Of Kilgore Trout, their newest album featuring twelve tracks, with only two of them crossing slightly the four minute wall.

A bit of history before we delve into the review. Kilgore Trout is a science fiction author invented by the late and great Kurt Vonnegut, who throughout the canon of this work mentioned lots of imagined novels and short stories by said writer. When in the mid-1970s a real novel was published under the name Kilgore Trout, many assumed it was a secret novel by Vonnegut himself, but it later turned out to have been written by Philip José Farmer, another famous science fiction writer of the era.

A little research shows that the twelve song titles on this new album don’t seem to be actual titles of Kilgore Trout novels, but appropriating his name helps to cement a certain lyrical quality to these short instrumental vignettes. Very often the song titles indicate what to expect. Waldo for instance has a dark science fictional undertone that would work well as the soundtrack for a desolate landscape on the moon. The Pan-Galactic Pawnshop Of The Souls has a playful mallsoft (which is a subgenre of vaporwave) touch, although in the end everything always stays very grounded in psychedelic rock, enhanced with moments of progressive and space rock thrown in here and there.

Vespero, whose Esperanto name means Evening, mostly concentrate their energies on guitar, bass, drums, violin and keyboards, but less common rock instruments like mandolin and saz allow for Middle Eastern influences on Robot Dervishes. In the past Vespero were champions of creating elaborate long songs that took you on a journey of the mind. I was scared that this magic quality would lack on this album of much shorter tracks. Fortunately, Vespero are much more than a one-trick pony and show that they can also craft a suspenseful album of more concise tracks, where each and every one of them manages to tell a short story by itself. If you are afraid to feel overwhelmed by the quartet’s longer material, Lost Stories Of Kilgore Trout is the ideal place to get to know this spectacular band from Astrakhan. Longtime fans will certainly not be disappointed either.