THE MISSING FIREFLIES...

Being a massive fan of the original 1977 album as well as their reunion concert in 2010, this EP provides some more really enjoyable listening material. I'm talking of the first four tracks here of course. As mentioned before, they were composed in the 70s and never made it to an album (apart from Sequenza Circolare, which is a new composition by Maurizio Muha to introduce La Giostra). All of the four tracks (Muha provided an excellent link) are highly enjoyable with all the elements and sounds we love about their 1977 album. The sound is also great, which already makes it a worthy investment. As the RPI performance (and the live snippet here) show, "Non Chiudere A Chiave La Stelle" was originally sung by guitarist Gaviglio with Vevey doing backing vocals. It is too bad neither were involved in this album or there was a vocal recording as it would have been great to hear this enjoyable song in good quality with their vocals, which sound great in the RPI video. This is of course not to say Sasso's voice does not sound great but this alternative would have been interesting. Now, the first 4 tracks I would definitely rate with 5 stars as they capture the lovely 70s sound with very warm and rich textures. The Live tracks are, of course, a great disappointment with regards to their sound. "Non Chiudere A Chiave La Stelle" is only a strange 1-minute snippet in basically unacceptable audio quality. The recording of the others is a bit better but still not anything you would want to listen to a lot, which is a shame since the performance is great (that much you can tell). Therefore, I wouldn't really count them for the album, which is why I consider it more of an EP than an actual album - even though it is sold for the price of a full album. I'm not sure if new ideas would have been disappointing but it is a shame that this release only offers such a short glimpse of the lovely compositions I wish there would be more of. Still I'll rate it as four stars because of the nice songs included here - probably it's enough to buy those in digital format.