Nicola Randone is a highly talented progressive music artist, and this CD is perfect proof of it. You noticed that I wrote "progressive music" instead of "rock", right? There are a lot of rock elements here, but to call this album a "progressive rock" album wouldn’t be justified.
Randone has chosen to sing in his native italian language, which means that I have no comment on the lyrics, other than that there’s lot of them. Like many italian songs, these ones sometimes sound very "full" lyricwise – where an american songwriter might have used 4-5 words, an italian ones seems to be able to squeeze in a dozen!
The vocal style of Mr. Randone is slightly operatic or theatral, which sounds a bit odd to these ears. I’m more used to the common rock vocalists…the vocals just sound a bit pretentious sometimes. His songwriting is more "operatic" as well, I found similarities to Robby Valentine’s material, although Randone’s songs are even more complex and less accessible, when it comes to melodies. If you’ve liked Robby Valentine, but thought that he should go for a more progressive style, you should check out Mr. Randone!
The album seems to get a bit more rock-oriented towards the end, the last few tracks are better than the eerie and odd first numbers. Randone’s operatic/theatral vocals sound even more out-of-place on these songs though. Even though Nightwish might be able to pull this off, it doesn’t mean that combination of metal/rock and opera works all the time. Still, for the more open-minded prog-lovers in our audience Mr. Randone’s music might be worth checking out.