ANONIMA SOUND LTD.

It was the early 70s and a band named Anonima Sound Ltd. released this album called Red Tape Machine, the first time i listened to this album i hardly believed this was an Italian band, since first of all the vocals are on English and also the music is not close to the folkish nor symphonic Italian sound that we use to listen, and to be honest if we listened to this without knowing where the band comes from, we would assume they were from England, or even Germany due to the sometimes acid sound.

Sometimes as a reviewer, i feel there are some albums that it`s enough with 3 listens to review, this is the case, i use to review albums after 5 listens in order to give a more accurate opinion about it, but sometimes an album may be easy to review maybe because the music is not the most complex, you know that term easy listening might be labelled to some albums or artists.

This album contains 8 songs around and a total time of 40 minutes, there is just one song above 7 minutes, the other ones goes from 4 to 5 minutes average. It starts with the title track Red Tape Machine, since the first vocals you will find that this is not the typical Italian band, despite it features some nice flute making that sligh folkish tone, this is mostly a psych song with nice guitar riffs. The Last Debutante is a catchy song, well actually i may say a poppish song which could have been a single hit in the UK charts of the 70s, i insist, no Italian sound over here. Window on the City for some reason reminds me a bit to Jethro Tull, this is an acoustic guitar driven song with some acid organs and nice bass lines and some flute here and there. Metro`s Song, again an acoustic guitar driven song, this time with a bluesy sound at the beginning. Then it turns faster just in order to return to the same sound as in the beginning a plain song in my opinion. Dog`s Life follows the same bluesy line again reminding me to some Tull passages, nice guitar riffs. Triangle is the longest song of the album and i think its interesting in a way, i mean it caught my attention so there has to be something there, the music actually its pretty similar to the English bands of the late 60s early 70s, so this is nothing original, but interesting anyway. Freedom actually its like the 2nd part of Triangle, the guitar sound is really similar, so are the vocals, but it suddenly becomes into a song with a happier feeling. The Roofer at last the last song of an album which lacks of originality and progressiveness, this song is maybe the heavier of them, psychedelic oriented music.

The prog element on this album is minimum, actually i wouldn`t call it prog myself, the music is not bad at all, but as i said above there is nothing original here and being an Italian band, the fact that they dont show any RPI flavour makes me being dissapointed of it. I definitely dont recommend it to fans of Italian prog, and actually i hardly recommend it to any prog fan, 2 stars for me.