ROSETTA

It's incredible! 15 years after his last proper release if we dont' consider Alexander's soundtrack, Vangelis is back with an amazing space-rock opera. As well as Mythodea released 15 years before, the idea is about making a soundtrack to a space mission, but while the previous didn't work very well, as it was a bit too pretentious and effectively closer to neo-classical music than to prog, this time he is back with a surprising album.

Rosetta is a probe launched by the Euroepean Space Agency which landed on a comet, the "67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko". It takes its name from the famous "Rosetta stone" which permitted the translation of the ancient Egyptian scripts into Greek.

Now, if you can imagine travelling in the outer space, in apparent absence of motion, with the light of the stars constantly breaking the darkness, the silence of a solitary starship. How do you think a soundtrack should be like?

Exactly like this, I say. Vangelis alternates low volume melodies, orchestral grandiosity, sadness, electronics in a mixture able to evoke all the sensations possibly related to the space travel. Only the title track is an exception. The same sounds used for his famous "Alpha" in a canon made of minor chords, like he did unite the mentioned "Alpha" with "Hymn" from Opera Sauvage. Honestly it sounds a bit "recycled material", but I'm a Vangelis fan and I think I know his tracks enough to notice the similarities. Not a bad track, but I put it on a lower level respect to the rest of the album.

Said so, everything else is excellent. "Philae's Descent" which follows the title track, restores the level. It's undoubtely Vangelis' stuff of the best category. Since now, the tracks fade one into the other following the concept like it was really a soundtrack to the mission.

The square waves of "Perihelion", reminding of the Virgin period of Tangerine Dream, the classical mood of "Elegy" that Gustav Mahler would have liked, lead to the excellent closure which has some similarities with Hans Zimmer's sountrack of "Interstellar" (not strange, of course).

An unexpected masterpiece of Progressive Electronic with a little flaw in the title track preventing me from rating it with 5 stars.

For who likes being lost in space for about 1 hour