(Symphonic Progressive) Holy Lamb - Salt Of The Earth (1999), FLAC (tracks+.cue+artwork), lossless

Could I pick Holy Lamb from Latvia out of your collection of 'sympho-bands from exotic places'?
It would be nice to play the quartet card-game with this new band from Riga. This début contains a mere five numbers, among which two are epics running 12 and 16 minutes respectively. The material on this album is midway between traditional prog and neo-prog, and has been written over a good 3 years.
'Whoever Disigned This Game' is hardly a startling opener. Singer Aigars Cervinskis is a little so-so. But then 'The Lingering Dream' sets in, a magnificent, compelling instrumental number with beautiful six-string play on a bed of keyboard soundscapes.
The mood develops further in the first long track. The instruments are well recorded with the guitar as the melodic guideline upfront. Cervinskis as well as Uldis Elerts pluck and crack their guitars with ease. Meanwhile, keyboardist Juris Rats is not pushed away the least and does his regular bit of soloing. Still, this is not a majestic number. A little too jumpy, restless and perhaps yet insufficiently elaborate. For that matter, it's a striking fact that the lyrics to the songs were written before the music was composed. With most bands in this genre, it's the other way round.
Track 4 is the most accessible song on the album, but only as far as it goes because it seems that Holy Lamb prefer complexity. The excellent guitar solo is really striking. The vocal part stays a little behind again, compared to the instruments.
The second epic, 'The Sea', kicks off with a quotation from the Holy Scripts, the Book of Genesis. A female singer joins to support Aigars, and that's a good move. The principal part, however, is balanced and, as said before, Holy Lamb never go for an all too easy musical presentation. Further on into the piece, church organ sounds are added with even more quotations from the Scripts, the Book of Mattheus in particular, which refers to the title of the album. At the end, following fifteen minutes of silence, a 2,5 minute rumbling appears in form of a hidden track. All in all, this CD can be described as 'quite nice'; expressed in digits, it makes 'a little 7'.

Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 3 from 29. August 2011
EAC extraction logfile from 18. May 2013, 21:50
Holy Lamb / Salt of The Earth
Used drive : _NEC DVD_RW ND-3540A Adapter: 1 ID: 1
Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No
Read offset correction : 48
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000
Gap handling : Appended to previous track
Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : Yes
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files (x86)\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\FLAC.EXE
Additional command line options : -6 -V -T "ARTIST=%artist%" -T "TITLE=%title%" -T "ALBUM=%albumtitle%" -T "DATE=%year%" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%tracknr%" -T "GENRE=%genre%" -T "COMMENT=%comment%" %hascover%--picture="%coverfile%"%hascover% %source% -o %dest%
TOC of the extracted CD
Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
---------------------------------------------------------
1 | 0:00.00 | 4:42.00 | 0 | 21149
2 | 4:42.00 | 4:50.37 | 21150 | 42936
3 | 9:32.37 | 12:12.48 | 42937 | 97884
4 | 21:45.10 | 6:42.74 | 97885 | 128108
5 | 28:28.09 | 16:48.19 | 128109 | 203727
6 | 45:16.28 | 17:52.08 | 203728 | 284135
Track 1
Filename D:\Music\olaf_alien\Holy Lamb - Salt of the Earth (2001, Mellow Records)\01 - Whoever Designed This Game.wav
Pre-gap length 0:00:02.00
Peak level 97.7 %
Extraction speed 4.1 X
Track quality 100.0 %
Test CRC A9E586FC
Copy CRC A9E586FC
Track not present in AccurateRip database
Copy OK
Track 2
Filename D:\Music\olaf_alien\Holy Lamb - Salt of the Earth (2001, Mellow Records)\02 - The Lingering Dream.wav
Peak level 66.4 %
Extraction speed 2.7 X
Track quality 99.9 %
Test CRC 1E588608
Copy CRC 1E588608
Track not present in AccurateRip database
Copy OK
Track 3
Filename D:\Music\olaf_alien\Holy Lamb - Salt of the Earth (2001, Mellow Records)\03 - My Star Untouchable.wav
Peak level 97.7 %
Extraction speed 4.5 X
Track quality 100.0 %
Test CRC B61F8C7D
Copy CRC B61F8C7D
Track not present in AccurateRip database
Copy OK
Track 4
Filename D:\Music\olaf_alien\Holy Lamb - Salt of the Earth (2001, Mellow Records)\04 - Rainfall in Your Heart.wav
Peak level 99.8 %
Extraction speed 4.4 X
Track quality 100.0 %
Test CRC E35EF2D9
Copy CRC E35EF2D9
Track not present in AccurateRip database
Copy OK
Track 5
Filename D:\Music\olaf_alien\Holy Lamb - Salt of the Earth (2001, Mellow Records)\05 - The Sea.wav
Peak level 97.7 %
Extraction speed 4.2 X
Track quality 99.9 %
Test CRC B84F15EE
Copy CRC B84F15EE
Track not present in AccurateRip database
Copy OK
Track 6
Filename D:\Music\olaf_alien\Holy Lamb - Salt of the Earth (2001, Mellow Records)\06 - unknown.wav
Peak level 97.7 %
Extraction speed 4.7 X
Track quality 100.0 %
Test CRC 2123DC81
Copy CRC 2123DC81
Track not present in AccurateRip database
Copy OK
None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database
No errors occurred
End of status report
==== Log checksum F69A4C7D9B58341407B1CABEC99426B886BDBA8C76F21AFECAD3DE08A4FE0C25 ====

REM GENRE "Progressive Rock"
REM DATE 2001
REM DISCID 460ECC06
REM COMMENT "ExactAudioCopy v1.0b3"
PERFORMER "Holy Lamb"
TITLE "Salt of The Earth"
FILE "01 - Whoever Designed This Game.wav" WAVE
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "Whoever Designed This Game"
PERFORMER "Holy Lamb"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "02 - The Lingering Dream.wav" WAVE
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "The Lingering Dream"
PERFORMER "Holy Lamb"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "03 - My Star Untouchable.wav" WAVE
TRACK 03 AUDIO
TITLE "My Star Untouchable"
PERFORMER "Holy Lamb"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "04 - Rainfall in Your Heart.wav" WAVE
TRACK 04 AUDIO
TITLE "Rainfall in Your Heart"
PERFORMER "Holy Lamb"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "05 - The Sea.wav" WAVE
TRACK 05 AUDIO
TITLE "The Sea"
PERFORMER "Holy Lamb"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "06 - unknown.wav" WAVE
TRACK 06 AUDIO
TITLE "unknown"
PERFORMER "Holy Lamb"
INDEX 01 00:00:00

Started at: Sunday, 19. 05. 2013. - 0:35.18
6 files found
1 -===- N:\Music\Reserve\Holy Lamb\Holy Lamb - Salt Of The Earth (1999)\01 - Whoever Designed This Game.flac
Extracted successfully
Conclusion: this track is CDDA with probability 100%
Tempfile successfully deleted.
2 -===- N:\Music\Reserve\Holy Lamb\Holy Lamb - Salt Of The Earth (1999)\02 - The Lingering Dream.flac
Extracted successfully
Conclusion: this track is CDDA with probability 100%
Tempfile successfully deleted.
3 -===- N:\Music\Reserve\Holy Lamb\Holy Lamb - Salt Of The Earth (1999)\03 - My Star Untouchable.flac
Extracted successfully
Conclusion: this track is CDDA with probability 100%
Tempfile successfully deleted.
4 -===- N:\Music\Reserve\Holy Lamb\Holy Lamb - Salt Of The Earth (1999)\04 - Rainfall in Your Heart.flac
Extracted successfully
Conclusion: this track is CDDA with probability 100%
Tempfile successfully deleted.
5 -===- N:\Music\Reserve\Holy Lamb\Holy Lamb - Salt Of The Earth (1999)\05 - The Sea.flac
Extracted successfully
Conclusion: this track is CDDA with probability 100%
Tempfile successfully deleted.
6 -===- N:\Music\Reserve\Holy Lamb\Holy Lamb - Salt Of The Earth (1999)\06 - unknown.flac
Extracted successfully
Conclusion: this track is CDDA with probability 100%
Tempfile successfully deleted.
Finished at: Sunday, 19. 05. 2013. - 0:38.56 (operation time: 0:03.38)