HERITAGE

One of Neuronium's mid eighties albums and possibly the most interesting in terms of diversity. I like the contrast between the almost poppy Torquemada and the dense dark Lethal Dose. Some nice guitar work on the former as well. Reprisal is probably my favourite Neuronium track with its driving beat and more brilliant guitar. Gets quite heavy at times with nice interplay with keyboards. The band at this time was a duo with Santi Pico providing guitar. The other track Secret Audience is more along the traditional ambient approach or earlier Neuronium. 4 Beautiful and diverse tracks I think I might scrub my previous comment that Synapsia is my favourite and change to Heritage.Fickle me.

Carlos Guirao's departure was a big loss for NEURONIUM. The band moved away from hypnotic 70s' influenced sequences to 80s' more or less inspired new-age / ambient music.

"Secret Audience" is a slow, delicate melancholic opening with absolutely no rythms. It certainly shares reminiscences with the style of their first albums. On the opposite, "Reprisal" shows NEURONIUM entering the next decade... but not the good way. Overall this track sounds very dated: it features many 80s' synth clichés and the guitar part does not bring anything. The short energic tune "Torquemada", with small guitar passages, is surprisingly quite enjoyable. The record finishes with the ambient "Lethal Dose". I find this composition a bit flat and less inspired than their previous works of the same type.

"Heritage" has a few interesting moments, unfortunately the long pieces fail at keeping interest.

"Secret Audience" starts quite promissing with some somber synths that set the mood, only to disappear after a short while and be replaced by lifeless synth pads. A mandolin shows up occasionally to lighten up the song and it continues like that repeatedly for a while. All of a sudden aggressive synths and horribly dated drums appear to awake me. We get synth and guitar solos back and forth and the drum pattern is annoyingly repeated for a long time. After that there's "Reprisal", a useless reprise of the previous theme.

"Torquemada" begins with sounds that remind of Hyperborea but after a few seconds there are repetitive drums again, and much faster this time. Fortunately it has nice melodies and the acoustic guitar solo is quite good.

"Lethal Dose" is gladly more atmospheric. Although nice for a while, at some point its lack of direction is noticeable. It ends with a really good guitar solo, but it's too late to save the album.

Summarizing: very few and completely different ideas with barely no atmosphere, all thrown together. Certainly not the best place to start with this band.

1.5 stars rounded up because of the cover, probably their coolest.