Progressive Rock
Seacrest Oy · August 2026
“Circle Of Wagons” opens with a broad symphonic entrance and soon shifts metre into a bouncing rhythm, with Jan-Olof Strandberg’s bass pushing from underneath and John Wilkinson’s vocal lines following it. More tempo changes come before Toni Jokinen’s guitar solo and an ending turned back towards the symphonic. Six and a half minutes, and neither of the two endings it looked like having.
It is made by Kimmo Pörsti, drummer of The Samurai Of Prog, the Finnish collective that has released “The 7 Voyages Of Sinbad” on the same label this year. It is his third solo record, after “Wayfarer” (2020) and “Past And Present” (2021), and the first on which he sets aside the folk, jazz and funk mixture of the other two and goes straight at symphonic song form. He plays drums, keyboards and bass, and produces, mixes and masters it himself. What is hard to find on it is a voice: four different people sing — Steph Honde, Dan Schamber, Michael Trew and Wilkinson — and three musicians besides him play bass. Eleven tracks yield eleven well-resolved sessions and no one character to tie them together.
The guests, on the other hand, bring colour where the record needs it. Risto Salmi adds saxophone and EWI, and on “Nightmares Come To Consume” the crossing of sax and guitar opens a zone that is not quite symphonic rock; Hanna Pörsti plays flute, and Rafael Pacha — whose “Not Normal After Music” we reviewed earlier this month — adds acoustic and electric guitars and keyboards. Not all of the tracks are his: “In My Life” is an Ambrosia cover played very close to the original, with him on bass and the vocal exchange between Michael Trew and Steph Honde out front; “Carrousel” is a 1987 piece by the French guitarist Jean-Pascal Boffo, and “Over the Sleeping Stars” is written by Toni Jokinen.
Eleven tracks and a little over an hour, with cover art by Ed Unitsky: a castle hanging off a cliff, a woman seated by a fire and that fantasy illustration that never quite leaves Nordic prog. The label is the Finnish Seacrest Oy and it came out in August. The two tracks where the voice is left darkened at the back of the mix, “Chasing Echoes” and “You And The Sun”, are also the two you remember least.
Rating: 7.2/10
Text by Guillem Cardós