Life’s Soundtrack – A Decent Run made better by Bulgaria’s Pantommind!

After coming home from food shopping at Trader Joe’s this afternoon, I came within an eyelash of talking myself out of going for a run! I’ve done that successfully for most of April, between long days and knees that really didn’t feel 100%. But I told myself no, you are going to run. I thought maybe if I go to Runner’s World and create a new route then at least it’s different and then I really can’t compare it to familiar runs! So that’s what I did and overall the run was pretty good the first mile was under 10 minutes and overall I averaged about 10:13 minutes per mile, and considering that I haven’t really run that much this month I’m okay with the pace!The soundtrack for the run was the latest album from Pantommind, Shade of Fate. From Prog Archives:

PANTOMMIND is a progressive metal band from Gabrovo, Bulgaria originally consisting of “Floyd” Rossen (vocals, guitars), Pete Christ (bass, keyboards), Jiip Randam (guitars, keyboards), Tony Ivan (backing vocals) and Drago (drums, percussion). From 1990 to 1995 the band was known as LAVENDER HAZE and they created some compositions heavily influenced by Queensryche but also included many electronic motives. In 1995, the band recorded a 4 track demo called “Unreality.” Shortly after recording the demo the band changed their name to PANTOMMIND.

It appears that over the course of the career membership in the band has continuously change here is the line-up of musicians on this album:

Tony Ivan / lead & backing vocals
Pete Christ / electric & acoustic guitars
Peter Vichew / guitars
Dido / bass
Sunny X / keyboards
Drago / drums & percussion, backing vocals

Guest musicians:
– Scaldor / Mellotron, ARP, MOOG & other
analogue synthesizers
– Konstantin Djambazov / guitar solo
– Julian Hristov / guitar solo

The album has a 4.32 rating at ProgArchives with 47% of the ratings label the album as an essential masterpiece of progressive rock music. While I may not go that far I really, really liked the album. During the run when things were getting tougher I kept saying go back to the music, sometimes when I went back to it, the music was soft and melodic and others times guitars and drums were wailing!! From prog reviewer:b_olariu at the Pro Archives:

what a surprise was for me when i heard for the first time this band from Bulgaria. Just great album full of great pieces, twists and time signatures of the highest calibre. They play prog metal in vein of Dream Theater or Symphony X, Fates Warning in places, but i don’t think they copy these bands, more are influenced by them. So this band proves that even in countries with no history in prog music are good bands and albums, one of them are Pamtommind with their album entitled Shade of fate from 2005.Read More

So check them out! As for me I’m checking out their 2009 release Lunasense! Here’s the title track “Shade of Fate”