CAST

"Al-bandaluz"
(Cast Productions, 2003)

Members:
Alfonso Vidales: keyboards and backing voice.
Francisco Hernández: voice and percussion.
Carlos Humarán: guitars and backing voice.
Kiko King: drums and percussion.
Flavio Jiménez: bass and backing voice.

Guests:
Pepe Torres: saxo, flute, clarinet and kena. 
José Algaba: bass. Michael Dean Starry: guitar.
Ismael Cortés, Mario Bocanegra y Enrique Slim: percussione.
Alberto Marquez: keyboards . Lupita Vidales: backing voice.

The new work of Cast is product of an international musical project; it is a double CD in which several tracks have the collaboration of some members of the Spanish band Omni, mainly. The result is brilliant, elegant, melodically rich and splendid. By the way, we find very inspired compositions that pick up the typical symphonic style here (almost epic) that Cast has gone cultivating and securing disk after disk; but this time it is also had the addition of exotic flavors of arabesque court (“Ensamble Al-Mayá”), and other elements of stylized Andalusian court (“Viajero Inmovil”, “Jerezcali”, “Lamento del Gato”), the same ones that are good to renovate and to enrich the stylistic slope of the band. The new members have known how to be coupled perfectly to the address of the group, being so the one assembles instrumental it sounds very adjusted and quite creative. It is also exclusively the first disk of Cast with letters in our language, in the few occasions that the voice appears, because certainly it is a work primarily instrumental. The listener prepares with each she listens of a banquet of diverse melodies, harmonies and textures. Apart from the topics before mentioned, it also deserves to stand out the most ambitious that are certainly the most extensive: “Encrucijada” it is a suite of three sections that it distills an energy and encircling pomposity, while the other suite, “El Puente” (of four sections) it throws toward a more crystalline melodic fineness, although without giving up the presence of passages loaded with rocker energy. The disk closes with the imposing one instrumental “Ansia, Angustia, Desesperación” that conserves the typical superlative melodic sensibility of Cast. In sum, an excellent sample of progressive Latin American that has already harvested several praises in the net, and that I can already consider as the best work in the whole trajectory of Cast until today.

César Inca