The main thing I want to emphasize about Лабиринт. Джазовые композиции by Мелодия is that it just seems so professional - and I mean that in a very positive way. It's sort of like brass rock extrapolated into a sophisticated instrumental form that can grapple with actual jazz and chock full of excellent arrangements and soli - including some tasty overdriven fuzz bass!

Honestly, after that one, the Ndikho Xaba & The Natives album seems a little lost - that's blasphemous, of course, Melodia were a bunch of white Commies and Ndikho Xaba and the Natives are... named Ndikho Xaba and the Natives, for chrissakes, but the album's a little long on semi-ambient noodles and short on fire or groove, except for the last track, which really cooks... for three minutes. And the less said about painful vocal number "Freedom" the better.

Recreation's Music or Not Music was tagged avant-prog on RYM, but it doesn't really work that way - it's more like a dissembled and reconstructed prog - everything hangs together and runs together but there's no real logic to the way its assembled - it's not a suite, it's a(n) (instrumental) patchwork quilt with bits of all of the musics that feed into prog - post-bop jazz, western classical, various folk musicks, some blues but not the kind that's blooze - just stitched together haphazardly, with most of the rock removed: imagine that someone mixed a more cohesive and eclectic (and less Canterbury) version of the second Softs album with a much, much less heavy/guitar-oriented take on the second half of Osanna's Palepoli but filtered it through Egg and throw in some bits of Strauss and various national anthems somewhere between Sonny Clark quoting "Pop Goes the Weasel" and a pisstake on Ekseption and ELP doing the "BACH GOES ROCK" thang and you've got it. oh wait there's also a couple of almost proto-emo "wacky inside joke" song titles, too. It's a hodgepodge, but it somehow feels extremely true to the "Prog SpiritTM", except that when you say "Prog SpiritTM" like that, even with scare quotes and a snarky trademark, you still wanna' vom. It seems like the sort of album I would've made in 1972, since that was before the internet was invented and I would've actually had time to practice piano, but it was, however, not before food and masturbation were invented, so I still wouldn't've had that much time to practice.      

Area's "Lobotomia" is the "(That Noodly Bit at the End of) Moonchild" of avant-prog - I actually really do consider it the most enjoyable moment in their discography, though revisiting their early works I find I generally prefer Area by a large margin, even if they don't bring the hooks of ITCOTCK or "Lizard." Guess I'm just a sucker for analog-synth-brain-scrub. Now can you imagine if KC had had Demetrio Stratos on lead vox? whoah. Or him just playing the role for a lark like Jon Anderson on "Prince Rupert Awakes?" I'll shut up now before I turn into a balding sixty-something white granddad with a motorcycle. *shudder*