IL FIUME

A very poor album indeed. Or at least it isn't what you'd expect to listen to once you've already come across masterpieces such as "Uomo Di Pezza" and "Felona e Sorona", and precisely in the same vein of those albums, the successful 70's Italian band suffered way too many inconveniences regarding its instrumentation and musical arrangements on "Il Fiume". It has got brilliant, sparkly moments despite the lack of strength and determination, but that doesn't justify the fact LE ORME could've come up with something more refined, intriguing and committed like they did in the past. Maybe at this point, it is useless to keep relying on comparisons to rescue the fine parts in "Il Fiume" and instead of that let's just focus on what's interesting to point out in here.

The conceptual passages are represented in "Il Fiume (parte prima)" and "Il Fiume (parte seconda)", which tell us the beginning from the end; the pieces complete each other softly, almost radiantly, with beautiful interludes in between and without pretentious guitar playing and complicated exercises of instrument execution. There are also pieces in here that deserve recognition in spite it all; "Madre Mia" is one of them. Firstly, we can notice Aldo TAGLIAPIETRA still has got the skills and the voice to pull off a production like "Il Fiume", showing his devotion to music and individually presenting a fine piece of work.

Most of the tracks in this album are simple and plain, demonstrating that sometimes it's only necessary to follow up a commercial trend and break the waves with the pop rock formula. In my opinion, the compositions standing out for the production are clearly evidenced by Francesco SARTORI's contributions on keyboards and piano, making the cause worthy somehow. We can perceive the efforts to avoid this production from drowning on "Chiesa d'asfalto", "Lungo il Fiume" (the percussion arrangements are outstanding by the way) and "Il Vecchio", where prog rock elements float around constantly, struggling to get the production back on track for brief moments, accomplishing the task satisfactorily. Another issue to be underlined here is the fact that if it weren't for the beautiful instrumental tracks (almost half album is instrumental), it would've turned out to be a train wreck.

Unfortunately, this recording is necessary to complete your LE ORME collection, but you can have it lent by a friend (like I did in the first place, but ended up purchasing it because of the album collection thing), listen to it and then you could come up with your own conclusions. On the other hand, you will be able to appreciate the album in a positive way if you think of TAGLIAPIETRA's guitar performing and SARTORI's heavenly executing on keyboards displayed here. Your call for newly prog rock comers and a reminder for Italian symphonic prog rockers.