De Profundis

A conceptual piece on the history of music, De Profundis finds After Crying, with the help of additional musicians, performing everything from plainchant to folk music, baroque to romantic styles of classical music, before ending the album with jazz and rock pieces. While none of the material could be mistaken for an original work in its particular style, the music here is both fascinating and beautiful. In some ways it is comparable to the more classically-oriented film scores, which often mimic various styles of classical music with modern touches. After Crying's classical training means the group does not come off as pretentious; they know what they are doing and have arranged most of the album to be performed as an ensemble instead of focusing on one instrument at a time, the way rock music is often done. Although the jazz and rock numbers find the group sounding awkward in their attempts to sound funky and loose, the addition of the odd spacey keyboard here and there on the more classically-styled tracks imaginatively augments those pieces. Although the lyrics are in Hungarian, most of the album is instrumental.