****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is an album by veteran, legendary Italian Prog band PFM, which follows their previous album “Emotional Tattoos” from 2017. Co-led by original members: vocalist / drummer Franz Di Cioccio and bassist Patrick Djivas, the band also includes guitarist Marco Sfogli, violinist Lucio Fabbri and keyboardists Alessandro Scaglione and Alberto Bravin. Prog icons Ian Anderson and Steve Hackett guest on one track. The album presents ten tracks, three of which are instrumentals and seven have lyrics. Same as on the previous album, this album also consists of two CDs, one with English and the other with Italian lyrics, with the identical instrumental background.The music is classic Symphonic Prog, which sound like something that might have been recorded in the early 1970s, and offers the typical Italian Prog mixture of lush lyrical, highly melodic music, which has a unique sonic signature, that no other Prog bands from outside of Italy are able to reproduce.Of course the CD with the Italian lyrics sound way better that the one with the English lyrics, since the Italian language is simply highly musical on its own and fits the instrumental background perfectly. This is true as far as every Italian bi-lingual album ever released, and there are quite a few of those.There is absolutely nothing innovative or different on this album that was not already stated fifty years earlier, but it still sounds great, at least to me, and infinitely better than anything Neo-Prog has to offer in the years that followed. This is like tasting a piece of cake your Grandmother baked when you were a toddler, which you never tasted again since.Overall, this is a solid / classic Italian Prog album, which offers a pleasant trip down the memory lane, and which will be obviously loved unconditionally by the fans of the genre. I had an absolute blast listening to this album and I am sure many other true Prog lovers will share the same kind of experience. Hats off to these two musicians in their mid-seventies, who carry playing what they believe in.
