Flyte - Dawn Dancer (Reissue) (1979/1994)

I have to be honest, before I even heard FLYTE I had prejudices; the comments and reviews were simply terrible, so it was a pleasant surprise, because bad ... they are not, but neither are they excellent. The band sounds almost like a hybrid between Camel, King Crimson, ELP, Genesis, Yes, a bit of Flemish influences and a good dose of Neo Prog. The main problem is that they don't seem to find their identity, while the keyboards are lush and borderline pompous, the frey with the line that divides Symphonic and Neo Prog: the guitar has Hard Rock fugues and the weak vocals by Lu Rousseau (in the rare occasions you can listen to them) are somewhere else. To achieve success with such an eclectic blend of styles, you have to be extraordinarily good and IMO they were only very good.

They started in 1972 in Breda, a Southern-Holland town near the Belgium border (this explains the Flemish influence) when a group of students from both countries decided to create a Prog band following the example of FOCUS, in those days the band had a female vocalist named Kitty Maanders who became later FLYTE. Not much is known about the story of FLYTE between their formation and the moment in which they reach their definitive line-up including Lu Rousseau (lead vocals, percussion), Ruud Worthman (acoustic and electric guitars), Jack van Liesdonck (acoustic and electric piano, clavinet, synthesizer), Leo Cornelissens (electric organ, mellotron, string ensemble, vocals), Hans Marynissen (percussion) and Peter Dekeersmaeker (bass, vocals) with whom they released their one and only album "Dawn Dancer" on the Don Quixote micro label in 79.

The last thing I want to do is to scare you away, the music of FLYTE is very good, they had great ideas but weren't able to paste them all with absolute coherence, maybe they were too ambitious, but there's a lot of enjoyable material and mellotron. Their sole album was reissued by the French Musea label in the early 90