SVPER - "Nuevo Cisne de Piedra"

The band formerly known as Pegasvs is back with a bang. Two years after releasing their incredible debut album, the Barcelonan duo just dropped the first single under their new legally approved name SVPER. Upon first impression, “Nuevo Cisne de Piedra” is classic Pegasvs: there’s the loud chorus/soft verse structure of “El Final de la Noche,” the more supporting yet always soothing voice of Luciana, and there's the unmistakable urgency of their synth lines, progressions, and digressions. While urgency remains the common thread, this new single sees them aiming for previously unseen levels of rapture, even if SVPER had never stood for half measures in any aspect. Unlike every track on Pegasvs, it actually begins with the synth riff that serves as a hook, and the percussion feels more stilted than robotic. Instead of carrying on with their “mythological box of synth crescendos,” SVPER have aimed for an enticing balls-out synthpop epic. Its sonic palette is more reminiscent of campy 80’s-style fonts, yet it mostly welcomes the same nostalgic sparkle and teenage apprehension that’s present in M83’s most poignant synth sagas. Details of a new album haven't been mentioned yet, still “Nuevo Cisne de Piedra” is an impeccable appetizer that will certainly satiate our hunger for more SVPER songs.
 

Pegasvs - Pegasvs

Pegasvs, Pegasvs
CANADA 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.

Pegasvs - "Brillar"

After an impressive series of jaw-dropping songs released last year (one of them even finding a spot in our own Top 20), 2011 never really saw that very much anticipated debut album of Barcelona’s intriguing prog-pop duo Pegasvs having its foreseeable winning lap at the blogs. However, it seems like the waiting for that will be over soon, since Pegasvs have just dropped a new track as an early treat from their forthcoming self-titled album, which they’re planning to release at the end of this month. “Brillar” is another sharp slice of enthralling synth-driven pop, still keeping everything mostly unchanged in their own aesthetic, with their instrumentation, singing style, use of synth hooks, song structure, and lyrical minimalism remaining very much alike to what we’d been accustomed to hear. But even with all of their blatant Pegasvs-ness, they can still succeed in leaping through a wide range of moods. While “Atlántico” was their warm and summery anthem, and “El Final de la Noche” was more like their kinetic travel into nocturnal rapture, “Brillar” is their most lighthearted song to date, the one where their airy hooks find pop bliss and precisely...shine.

Video: Pegasvs - "El Final de la Noche"

Spain’s breakthrough progressive pop band Pegasvs has earned every ounce of their hype delivering one amazing track after another. Considering “La Melodia del Afilador” and “Atlantico” are two of our favorite rock songs of the year already, Pegasvs debut album is starting to take the form of an essential. Band members Luciana and Sergio have made a smart move releasing yet another stunning new song. “El Final de la Noche” brings synth power into Pegasvs sharp sonic edges, and it doesn’t hurt to unveil it alongside a video produced by the always reliable CANADA. “El Final de la Noche” is dark and wonderfully submissive, an acknowledgement of the night as a provisional rapture. I love the secrecy of this band, there’s something very romantic about them. I can’t quite put it into words, but I imagine this is how it used to feel decades ago when people would count the days for record releases in order to presume an artist’s image. Word on the street says Pegasvs will be releasing their debut in a couple of months. We’re drooling for it.

Stream: Pegasvs - "Atlántico"

A few months ago we fell in absolute love with Pegasvs' "La Melodia del Afilador", a mysterious band by ‘Sergio y Luciana’ whose sharp, cutting-edge approach to rock&roll had as brainstorming them as part of the new ‘Spanish Rock Flair.’ The band’s profile is still pretty much in the dark, but a new song has unveiled a few hints of where the band is headed, and we’re excited. First, we’re just happy they’ve finished a second song, a good sign of the band’s solidification. We also learn half of Pegasvs is actually Sergio Perez, an interesting character in Spain’s indie, mainly as the head of Thelematicos (whose debut album we weren’t too enthusiastic about). The new track “Atlántico” isn’t as poignantly catchy or jagged as their first track, but it carves further into your skin using it as a map to some kind of hazy to-the-core experience.