ECHOES FROM THE DEEP

One thing I really enjoy about listening to so much music is that there are times when I come across gems that I know would have passed me by if I didn't spend so much time in the scene, and this is very much a case in point. Apparently this is a 2012 album from a young Italian band, but one wouldn't guess that from just playing it. While I think that I would have worked out the country, there is no way that I would have thought that his was a new album as instead it sounds as if it is yet another album that I have only come to some forty years after it was originally released. There is nothing false about this album; it doesn't sound at all as if it is trying to recreate the progressive sounds of times gone by but rather that this is indeed from that era.

Classic Italian progressive music, with swathes of hammonds and mellotrons, mixed in with flute and quirky time signatures and shifts in moods and we have here a bringing together of PFM, Jethro Tull, King Crimson and VDGG in a way that is inviting and somehow familiar while also being fresh and new. It may not be breaking any new ground and in many ways is totally regressive, but it is approached in such a manner that progheads will welcome this as fresh and inventive and totally genuine. Superb. www.blackwidow.it