Short Reviews [Agropelter - 2025 - "The Book Of Hours"]

What we have here is the debut album by Agropelter, which may seem like a band but in reality, is more of a project from multi-instrumentalist Kay Olsen. Kay provides guitars, bass, church organ, and keyboard leads (including Mellotron, Hammond organs, ARP, cembalo, Minimoogs, and Taurus bass pedals) on the album while there are also contributions from Jonas Reingold (Steve Hackett, The Flower Kings, Kaipa, Karmakanic) on fretless bass, Andreas Sjoen (Umpfel, VADE, Sean Ashe) on drums, and Mattias Olsson (Anglagard, White Willow, Molesome) on percussion plus further guests providing various strings and woodwinds. The result is an instrumental which is influenced by both classic prog bands such as Genesis, Camel, King Crimson, and Eloy, and classical composers such as Rachmaninoff, Beethoven and Bach. In many ways it feels like a classical album, but there are also times when it feels as if we have been taken back into the Golden Age when Wakeman produced works which also combined the best of both worlds into one. This is not something which can be dipped into but rather feels much more like a single piece of music which continues to thrive, adjust and change as we move from a classical piano piece into something dominated by a Moog yet it all makes sense at the time. The music flows, morphing along its route and should only be played when the listener has the time to be able to sit and really get inside the music. This is not something designed for radio play or for someone to listen to one song here or there, or play as background, this is a piece of music which needs to have the time invested into it so the beauty can be uncovered which only happens the more time one spends in Kay's world. If this is a debut, I wonder what we can expect from the next one?