UT

This is definitively a good album (the last released before first New Trolls' split up), where the members of the band show their great musicianship wandering between progressive moods and hard rock.... After an album in English language ("Searching For A Land"), the band come back to Italian lyrics: the title of the album "Ut" is the first note of the Gregorian musical scale created by Guido d'Arezzo and the Italian poet Dante Alighieri is quoted on the album's jacket.

The instrumental opener "Studio" is a Johann Baptist Cramer's studio for piano elaborated by Maurizio Salvi and it leads to another short instrumental "XXII^ strada", more jazzy and "proggy": both seem to be efforts to blend classical and rock influences with good results.

Then comes "I cavalieri del lago dell'Ontario" (The Ontario Lake's Riders), my favourite track on this album, where drums and flute introduce a kind of military march while the vocals draw an epic and doomed Canadian landscape (don't forget that the bass player in this line up, Franck Laugelli, is from Toronto!). "The path is long and hard / I'm tired and I can't keep up / I lost my companions / When I'm back I will cry / The forest was hugging me / I couldn't think to return anymore / Red jackets blended to the blood / That Ontario River will bring away"... Then the music brings "echoes of war" before to come up to an end. "Everything ended so / Nobody never came back / And into the time will run / The march that accompanied us".

The short folkish "Storia di una foglia" is the only weak moment in this album while the following "Nato adesso", a piano ballad that melts in a long acid guitar solo, is another great track. "C'è troppa Guerra" is a long "hard rock" song with a remarkable "aggressive" electric guitar work, but in my opinion Nico Di Palo's voice seems here too fragile to match up with the music. "Paolo e Francesca" and the amazing "Chi mi può capire"(Who can understand me) are more delicate and fit better to "New Trolls style". "Nobody can understand. I will leave silently / Without a goal / And you will come with me"

In the whole this is a great album and it marks the end of New Trolls' progressive "Halcyon days".