FROM ANCIENT TIMES

A little different than your average Italian prog band,AINUR are a project formed in 2004 in Venaria Reale,Piemonte by three young musicians:Luca Catalano on guitars,Marco Catalano on drums and Gianluca Castelli on various keyboards.As the band claims,the need of transposing into music J.R.R. Tolkien's ''Silmarillion'' pushed the members to establish a project,consisting for their first album ''From ancient times'' of 18 members in total.This effort was finally released in 2006 by Electromantic Music.

Forget about the Classic Italian Prog sound here.''From ancient times'' has a dominant fairytale atmosphere throughout the album,not to mention that all lyrics are sung in English. Unfortunately the music often gets lost in the need of story-telling with lots of spoken/sung parts back-rounded by atmospheric keys and medieval flutes.Female vocals are really great,producing a result close to RENAISSANCE's musicianship,supported usually by nice piano and organ parts.I'm not really fond of the following male operatic vocals.Despite they are also qualitive,they seem to bore me a bit along the way.Musically speaking the album is closer to Folk/Acoustic Prog Rock with elements from Classical Rock OperasMassive use of string instruments,flutes,pianos and keyboards in order to capture and adapt Silmarillion's images.AINUR do that well at some point,though most of the tracks sound quite similar. Surprisingly the few tracks containing the electric guitars/bass/drums combination (the longer ones actually) are closer to Hard Progressive Rock than Classic Prog.Metal riffing and intense vocals support this claim.Yet the balance seems a bit lost trying to listen to the album in its full version.Calm spacey,classical or medieval parts are mixed with almost metal music and that's not the best thing I can face.

The band is talented,no question about it.The problem is that music in here is quite similar in moments,a bit too calm for most of its part,while this Tolkien adaptions-thing seems too old- fashioned for me.However,I believe these musicians can do much better things in the future and I will support them with a 3 star rating.Recommended,considering always the afore- mentioned warnings.