Progressive Rock
Melodic Revolution Records · 4 September 2026
Only one of the eleven tracks on “Quivira” credits a violinist. It is “Moving Forward”, six minutes and forty-nine seconds long, and the player is Joe Deninzon, the violinist from Stratospheerius, listed as a guest in the album credits. On the other ten, the violin sound that runs from end to end comes out of Lisa LaRue’s keyboards, something the Progressive Rock Central review half concedes when it says that “Quivira Bound” opens with what sounds like an electric violin and is probably synthesisers.
The album is self-titled, although the Progressive Rock Central entry files it as “Debut”, and it came out on 4 September, licensed to and distributed by Melodic Revolution Records. Quivira are a project from Topeka, Kansas: Lisa LaRue on keyboards and programming, who writes the music and the lyrics for everything except “The Turk”, written with John Baker, and who also produces and mixes the record with him; Baker on guitars, bass and the vocal on track six, and Jake Livgren on the rest. The singer’s surname comes from where it seems to come from: Jake Livgren is the nephew of Kerry Livgren, founder and chief songwriter of Kansas, who was also born in Topeka. What the record tells is local in the same way: Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition in search of Quivira, the Native American villages that he believed held the gold, in the sixteenth century. The cover is David H. Overmyer’s mural at the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka, and it is called “The Coming of the Spaniards”.
Sixty-six minutes and eleven tracks, most of them without vocals. The opener, “Intro – The Coming of the Spaniards”, runs three minutes and fifty-one seconds of choirs and written strings before any song begins, and from there the record grows in blocks: “Carved from the Sun” just passes the eight-minute mark, “Nothing Is Everything” seven and a half, and “Kicking Rocks”, at four minutes and eighteen seconds, is the only track featuring the second guest, guitarist Evan Stanley. The two double-titled tracks (“The Turk / Follow the Wind” and “Prelude to Anywhere / Weekend Conquistadors”) do the work of tying the story together, and the closer, “Still Breathing”, puts LaRue’s piano out in front. Which tracks carry vocals and which do not is, oddly enough, the one thing about this record that cannot be written down: the CD listing marks seven as instrumentals and the source review assigns three of them differently.
That timbre ends up being the problem. A band that locates its identity in a sound it does not have ends up leaning on a keyboard patch for something that would ask for a bow, and there is an awkward measure of how far the two sounds have come to be confused: the critic who reviewed the album for Progressive Rock Central places Deninzon on a track that is not his, and describes as keyboards the track where the violinist actually plays. Hiring a violinist for one track out of eleven and placing him where nobody notices is an expensive way of not solving the problem. There is a second, more practical effect. With vocals present on only part of the record and four tracks past the six-and-a-half-minute mark, the sixty-six minutes lean almost always on the same interplay of keyboard and electric guitar, and the second half asks the listener for the same attention as the first without changing who does what. That said, what Quivira do well they do very well: the writing, the kind that holds an eight-minute suite together without losing the thread, is what least often comes off on a first record, and here it is already there.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Guillem Cardós