OVERTURE

Overture come from Mores, a small town in the province of Sassari, Sardinia, and came to life in 2010 rising from the ashes of another band called Sons Of The Rascals. The first line up included Simone Desogus (drums), Samuele Desogus (guitar), Mattia Serra (keyboards, vocals), Salvatore Sassu (flute, guitar) and Stefano Sanna (bass). After a good activity on the local scene where they started to perform progressive rock covers alternated with their own compositions, in 2018 the band recorded and self-released an excellent eponymous debut album with a renewed line up featuring Luigi Ventroni (vocals), Simone Desogus (drums, percussion, vocals), Stefano Sanna (bass), Samuele Desogus (guitars), Fiorella Piras (flute, vocals) and Simone Meli (keyboards, backing vocals) plus the guest Sara Cuzzupuli (violin, vocals). The overall sound is well rooted in the best tradition of Italian symphonic rock and, as music goes through many changes in rhythm and mood, every now and again I'm reminded of another band called Unreal City. Anyway, I think that the art cover by Mauro Mondiello describes the musical content of the album better than many words...

The dreamy opener "Intro" is just a short instrumental track that sets the atmosphere and leads to the excellent "Lux et Ombra" (Light and Darkness), an amazing piece sung in Italian and Latin and dealing with the eternal contrast between Evil and Good. The music and lyrics evoke dark fallen angels, winged demons and damned souls burning in the flames of hell waging war against the illuminated, divine power of science and knowledge: everyone expects to win on the border between Darkness and Light, in an endless fight raging in a world without glory...

The melancholic "Il mendicante" (The beggar) starts by a touching, classical inspired, solo piano passage, then soaring vocals backed by the other instruments begin to portray the image and feelings of a desperate, solitary beggar who's on the brink of committing suicide by jumping from a bridge into the icy waters of the city river...

The following "A Deer In The River" begins with an acoustic guitar arpeggio and is a bitter-sweet piece dealing in a surrealistic way with the problem of emigration. The music and lyrics tell of the fate of a woman who had to leave her little country village on the banks of a river and go in a big city to earn a living. She never feels at ease in the metropolis and her feeling of nostalgia is always strong. Eventually, before passing away, she comes back to her old hamlet and becomes a deer longing for peace in the river...

The following "Crop Circles" is a long track with a mysterious atmosphere and a science-fiction theme. At night a spaceship lands in the middle of a wheat field. Suddenly the wheat start to dance under a strange green light but there's no sound nor fear... Meanwhile a farmer sleeps and dreams in his house, unaware of what's happening in the field. At dawn, when the farmer and his family wake up, everything seems in order but in wheat field there's something new... It's up to the listener imagine what!

The last track, "Ephesia's Chime" is a dark, disquieting piece where the music and lyrics tell about a child game turned into nightmare. There's murder and betrayal, hidden secrets that lead to madness and a storm of haunting melodies and voices coming from the unconscious... Here every now and again the music and the subject matter could recall the deep red colours of Goblin but the band manage to add their own strokes of colour to the musical tableau in an effective way.

On the whole, I think that this is a really good work although the band seem definitively more at ease when using their mother language...