RITUALE ALIENO

I must admit to being slightly disappointed by this album. Let me hasten to say that it's not bad by any means, and contains several really rather interesting passages. And yet, for an album in the Zeuhl category I expect more compositional ingeniuity than what I can find on "Rituale Alieno". 3 stars is a good score though, so if the rest sounds negative it's perhaps partly because pretty much every other review is over the moon about this album whereas my position is slightly sub-lunar.

To call it Zeuhl is, I'd say, about half accurate. About half the album could, at a stretch, fit in with what I think of as Zeuhl, and the rest is mainly some form or other of dark symphonic prog with a very heavy synth presence.

My main problem with this album is that all the songs are composed by what I call the Lego brick method. Each of the lengthy track consists of a series of chunks of music of 2-3 minutes each which are stuck together like Lego bricks with little or nothing in common and no apparent reason why they should belong together. Now I can't rule out the chance that there is somthing I'm missing, but to me it sounds like bits of music have been added to the pile until they thought "that's enough for one song".

The kind of sound UTO create is all over the place on this record, which is probably a deliberate choice but doesn't work for me. Even if the synthesizer can make hundreds of sounds, it's not necessarily a good idea to use them all. Also the guitar work frequently veers into metal territory, which I find annoying in this context, while much of the music is tonally not that interesting. You come to expect some nice experimental tonality from Zeuhl, but especially some of the solos on this album are really rather ordinary and uninterested if you're used to Zeuhl or even contemporary jazz.

On the whole, not a bad effort at all, but certainly no Zeuhl classic in my book.