COLLAGE

Moving away from the beat and psychedelic sixties sounds of their discreet debut album "Ad Gloriam", the five-piece turned trio Le Orme tucked themselves into the shelter of the huge shockwave that the effervescent progressive rock movement coming from the British Isles brought with it and released "Collage", their second album and one of the seminal works of the Italian side of the genre. Dazzled by E,L&P's performance at the legendary Isle of Wight festival in 1970, Le Orme, like many Mediterranean bands of that time, took the band led by Keith Emerson as one of their references for the development of their proposal and tinged it with melodic elements of their own.

That sense of epic grandiloquence indebted to Emersonian influences is what starts the album with the instrumental baroque piece of the same name, a demonstration of Antonio Pagliuca's skill on keyboards, with Michi Dei Rossi on percussion as an ideal ally, to which are added the daring reflections in the lyrical voice of Aldo Tagliapietra both in the sombre and changing "Era Inverno" and in the melancholic initial verses in the environmentalist critique of "Cemento Armato", a piece that in between finds the trio building an intense and solid wall of sound, one of the best on the album.

And if the lysergic experimentation of the instrumental "Evasione Totale" plagued by synthesised keyboards brings Le Orme closer to the most psychedelic Pink Floyd, their most personal and peaceful side is exposed in the beautiful fragility of "Immagini" with Tagliapietra's megaphonic voice backed by Pagliuca's celestial keyboard, and in the infinite sadness of "Morte di un Fiore", which concludes the album by fading into the horizon.

"Collage" is an excellent album that, despite not having a profuse diffusion and recognition, helped superlatively to underpin the way for the take-off of Italian progressive rock in the early 70s.

4 stars