SYNDONE: Odysseas (PROGRESSIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

There are several definitions of progressive rock. For some, these two words imply a music bringing progress, a change from what was done before. For others, it means that the music is progressing, evolving throughout the same track, or from one track to another, unlike ballads built on alternating verses and choruses. Syndone could well reconcile everyone with his last album.

If we stick to the progression within the same song, the tracks that compose this "Odysseas" are anything but linear. No verse/chorus but real passionate and exciting progressive, full of breaks and surprises, artists' delirium, excessiveness, requiring full attention to be appreciated at its true value. The melodies are so blurred that one can sometimes pass from one track to another without even realizing it, carried by the impulse of a melodious music which is constantly developing and building.

As for the renewal that "Odysseas" brings, it is not so much for the music in general, its progressive song being strongly anchored in the 70's, as for the intrinsic course of Syndone that we can notice. Because as much the previous album "La Bella E La Bestia" was made to tailor-made for its singer Riccardo Ruggeri, as much "Odysseas" includes wide and beautiful instrumental tracks dominated by the panoply of Nik Comoglio's keyboards and often embellished with Francesco Pinetti's vibraphone. Invocazione Alla Musa' which opens the album is a perfect demonstration, the invoked muse being certainly the same one that inspired ELP for a certain "Tarkus". Beside the two men, an impressive array of instrumentalists comes to enrich an abundant and inventive score.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to think that the vocals are absent from this album. Always as theatrical and emphatic, excessive but perfectly controlled and navigating easily on an impressive range up to climb with an apparent ease (sign of the great ones) in the most vertiginous highs, Riccardo Ruggeri's singing will undoubtedly not please everyone but is one of the essential ingredients of the charm released by Syndone.

How not to merge with the poignant 'Il Tempo Che Non Ho', a soft and sad track like a rainy day on a country landscape? Not to be seduced by the Arabian melodies, the oriental guitar, then the retro ballad of 'Penelope' where, for a few measures, the band resurrects the Queen of 'You Take My Breath Away'? Not to fall for the intriguing charm of 'Ade', witnessing a superb osmosis between the instruments and the vocals, the latter melting into the music with fluidity in a perfect balance? Not to be enthusiastic about the romantic grace of 'Vento Avverso' where the expressiveness of the music stimulates the imagination to create a multitude of images? Or not to vibrate to the hymn of hope that rises on 'Daimones'?

The introduction was raised as it should be to hook the listener, the final is consensual and warm. Delicate, sensitive, varied, "Odysseas" takes the listener on a journey for almost fifty minutes to the sound of an impressionist and expressive music, fluid and evolving, which nevertheless remains sufficiently marked out not to get lost in the maze of mishmashed improvisations and confirms Syndone's status as a major progressive band of the 2000s. - Official website

SYNDONE

ODYSSEAS

SYNPRESS 44

PROGRESSIVE ROCK