YS

What an album! This stuff is just great. I wish all RPI sounded like this. I guess a lot of the people who rate this album low like they're Italian prog all nice and predictable. This ain't no PFM! I've heard a lot of people claim that Osanna's Palepoli or Museo Rosenbach's Zarathustra sounds similar to this album. Not to my ears. Neither of those two albums sound as exciting or original as the music found on Ys. Bronzo's first album doesn't sound anything like this either. It's too bad a lot of these Italian bands only released one or two albums. I would have liked to see what this group in particular would have done between 1973-75. It boggles the mind.

Even though the music here is divided into seperate tracks, it is one whole piece(like Thick As A Brick). There is nothing here that makes me want to skip anything. What you get here is a mix of hard rock/psychedelic rock, jazz and classical along with some emotive Italian- style singing. Oh, and there's some female vocals. Those female vocals...man, they're crazy, I love 'em! They sound like the cousins of Hatfield's Northettes who just escaped from a mental institution. Seriously, you can just picture these girls in straight-jackets when they recorded their vocals. I love the part in "Introduzione" where they sing all fast and crazy; they sound like turkeys going "gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble". This album brings tears to my ears, because that part makes me laugh so hard! Did I mention how great this album is yet?

I don't understand any of the lyrics, but I'm the kind of person who thinks of vocals as just another instrument, so it doesn't matter to me. Apparently this tells the story of some dude who dies and goes to hell and meets his dead relatives. Or something like that. Apart from the guitar, bass, drums and vocals you get a nice mix of keyboards: piano, harpsichord, Hammond, Mellotron and Moog. I hear a bit of vibraphone or something similar as well. I don't think the Italians get enough credit for their pioneering use of synthesizers. Everybody talks about the Berlin school, and the British bands, and the fusion guys. But in 1972 almost none of them were yet using synths. Italian artists like Bronzo, Banco and Battiato had mastered synthesizers before people like Tony Banks, Chick Corea, Klaus Schulze or Kraftwerk ever started to use them. In fact, at this point the only ones in the prog world really using synths were Emerson, Wakeman, Zappa, Popol Vuh and Gentle Giant(on their studio albums anyway).

This is such a fantastic album. The music is all over the place and when you listen to this for the first time, you don't know what's coming next. Some copies have the bonus song "La Tua Casa Comoda". It's more 'normal' sounding then anything on the album, but it's just a throwaway to me. It's hard to describe the music here, but it reminds me of ELP(at their craziest) crossed with VDGG(at their craziest). What a great album. Seriously, sell your kids and buy this album. You won't regret it. 5 stars.