The Warsaw prog-rock musicians from Riverside recorded for their fans an EP, "Voices In My Head" to while away the waiting for the successor to the debut "Out Of Myself," which received excellent reviews worldwide. The EP consists of five new compositions and three live versions of the tracks from the first album, recorded in the Warsaw Traffic Club in May last year.

While "Out Of Myself" could be labelled as progressive metal, the new pieces have nothing in common with this genre. They are rather a development of the most mellow fragments of the debut album. The pieces are not as catchy, which does not mean they are worse. The new tracks bring to mind even more the bands which Riverside were many times compared to, like Marillion and especially Porcupine Tree.

The album starts off with a beautiful, only two-minute piece, "Us," where delicate sound of the guitar and blurred keyboards harmonize with melancholic, quiet vocals of Mariusz Duda. The next track is "Acronym Love" with a wonderful solo of Piotr Grudziński. In "Dna ts. Rednum or F.Raf," we can hear some electronic music which builds the atmosphere of anxiety. It is the most interesting and daring piece on the album, a definite number one for me. The fourth one, "The Time I Was Daydreaming," brings to mind the above mentioned Marillion or the Polish Satellite. And the last track, "Stuck Between," is catchy enough to score high in the charts.

The three live tracks show that Riverside's music takes on another dimension during the concerts. The band perform superbly and prove that their success is far from accidental. They sound really well together and complement each other perfectly.

I wonder whether "Voices In My Head" will have anything in common with Riverside's second full album. Irrespective of that, I believe it will be at least as good as the EP.