LAYERS OF STRATOSPHERE

I'll start off my review by saying that this is an Italian album which could have fooled me into thinking it was a German album. Whether or not that's where the influences actually are, it seemed to have a bit of that good ol' krautrock/space rock feel characterized by lots of ambience, synthesizer arpeggiation and super-grooving bass lines. There's lots of great texturing going on here, melodic guitar playing, and nicely composed synth parts that are always melodic and purposeful and never feeling like you have to keep up with them; even the leads are more there for ambience and feel than anything else. "Mind Flies" is a great example of this. The two downsides for me were that the vocals never really grabbed me. They weren't frequent, but when they were present, for example, in tracks like "The Highest Cliff," I always felt like the singer's voice was a bit too mundane for my tastes. The other downside is that while all the tracks were good and fun to listen to, there wasn't really a track that blew me away. Everything was good, this is definitely a good album, but nothing was amazing. However, in the end, this could be just my preference. I would definitely recommend this to people who are big fans of space rock; I think they would most likely be quite pleased. Layers of Stratosphere is most certainly an enjoyable album from start to finish.