Pegasvs, PegasvsCANADA Editorial, Spain
Rating: 92
by Carlos Reyes
Progressive rock lost its sanity during the aughts. After thirty years of the prog rock theorem, song structures devalued artistic credibility and intricate compositions exceeded shock value. Like many other shifts in culture, the genre is moving into a more subtle golden wave of progressive pop, one that doesn’t need to push the boundaries of the genre to achieve artistic integrity (the grace of pop music). So much of this swing translates as glory in the Olympian debut album of Luciana and Sergio, two synth junkies that cultivate melodic splendor as the esoteric constellation, Pegasvs.
In their provision of debutants, and after many months of well-credited buzz, on their self-titled debut Pegasvs envelops the prophecy of a synthesized riff. Pegasvs harmonizes analog measure with the rumination of moving forward. Although hardly conceptualized in its themes, the nine tracks that comprise the album circulate on a beautiful (yet heretical) landscape of shoegaze orchestration. The album’s entrance (“Brillar”) sighs about an everlasting splendorous shine and, as fantastical as that may sound, these guys aren’t kidding around. The songs are rapturous and digressive to the zeitgest. Pegasvs keeps a minimalistic aesthetic to rather point its exponential eye to a perpetual extent, and they’ve succeeded. For referential purposes, it wouldn’t be a surprise (or a blasphemy) to remember this album as a shrewdly mythological box of synth crescendos. But these crescendos are more than tools for melodic ascendance, they carry the emotional force needed for an album that travels on its own atmospheric drift.
All nine tracks of the album share similar compositions, but the journeys themselves seem to have experienced variation in gravitational force. Pegasvs’ search for rhythm patterns unfolds beautifully in an album that feels cohesive but reveals its dimensions through a level of disparity. The finished edits of the songs we’ve come to be deeply attached to sound spectacular by themselves, but even more significant on the broader canvas. “Atlántico” feels like it was treated as a navigable whirlpool, where engaging hooks and elementary geography dissolve at the grandiose scale of a love tale. The band’s hits “El Final de la Noche” and “La Melodía del Afilador” sound sharper and more delirious than ever before; both tracks traveled from optimist basement numbers to serious anthemic moments. This is not a pair of revisionists; they are renaissance people at heart.
And then there are the virgin-to-the-ear tracks that are as equally impressive. “No Volverá” stands out as the most out front and vocally naked number. This track unveils a potency in Pegasvs to detach from frenetic tempo and explore subsonic speeds. Luciana and Sergio share a bohemian wilderness that they’ve come to confront in the album’s most dualistic piece, “Inmortal.” This is our entrance to an operatic netherworld that punches you from the moment you knock on the door and doesn’t stop the bruising until it gives you a seizure (one that comes with frightening cathedral screams). This is Pegasvs at their best, using adept spacing for narrative and topic transgression. In a way, what the duo has done throughout the album is to provide the folk remedies for a synthetic alternative. Because even if the opening sequence of “Sol de Medianoche” smells like Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” Pegasvs makes sure to provide the negative space, balladic tone, and symphonic blow-out for the conception and distillation of their own trail. Pegasvs is bleak, assaulting to the senses, and flawless in its premise of a synthesized dialect–a supreme opera prima that is already moving forward.