A.C.T.

"Imaginary Friends"

(2001)

According to Ola Andersson, guitarist of the Swedish group A.C.T., their main influences were the groups City Boy, Electric Light Orchestra, It Bites, 10cc, Saga, Queen, Dream Theater and UK, and indeed, all those ingredients are those that can find in more measure in their music, to those that me IQ would add in the first album "Today's Report", and Kansas in this second album.

That is to say that the style of A.C.T. it is necessary to imagine it as a conglomerate of all those groups, with a quite American sound, where they highlight the extraordinary vocal melodies, gracefulness of a very similar singer to Francis Dunnery of It Bites, the continuous abrupt changes and the stylistic variation inside each song and the forcefulness of quite hard guitars, although this is not progressive metal.

In spite of the changes and variety, the style of A.C.T. it is quite easy of digesting, overalls thanks to the pop air of the melodies.

The group this formed for: Jerry Sahlin, synthesizers, voices, vocoder and synthetic drum and unquestionable brain of the group, author of the whole music, Ola Andersson, guitars and voices, Peter Asp, bass, percussion and voices, Herman Saming, singer and silent trumpet, more Tomas Erlandsson, drums and voices. Besides the intervention of The Acting Orchestra, composed by two violins, a viola and a cello.

In this second album we also have a final suite, like in the first one, besides 6 short songs, and a beautiful theme of a very different line, hidden at the end of the CD, compound and interpreted by the drums.

Personally my favorite topic is "Hippest Flop", a topic with fantastic melodies to the It Bites that I find really brilliant, alone for the already voucher the pain the disk. The rest is also of very good level, as the potent "Take It Easy, A supposed Tour" where they are noticed Dream Theater influences clearly, the longest and complex Biggest Mistake where it is also appreciated clearly to It Bites and other groups of those mentioned at the beginning, Imaginary Friends also with excellent melodies and " She/Male " also in the line of changes of time continuous and big melodies. And of course the suite " Relationships ", where we have all the ingredients of an entire progressive, complex theme and with well differentiated parts, where influences are appreciated mainly of Kansas, Dream Theater, It Bites and Queen.

In definitive, other very good album of probably, the group with a sound but it makes happy and positive of the current scene of the progressive rock, a group of which was surely spoken in the next future.

Ferran Lizana
rockomic@navegalia.com