ECCO L'IMPERO DEI DOPPI SENSI

Homunculus Res, a fantastic Italian prog band with strong Canterbury Scene elements is back with a new album, after their phenomenal work from 2020 "Andiamo in Giro di Notte e ci Consumiamo nel Fuoco".

"Ecco l'impero dei doppi sensi" is the name of the new album, and here, the band successfully brings a combination of Canterbury that perfectly implements elements of psychedelia, tinged with jazz and progressive, but also gives a dose of pop from the sixties. Ironic and oblique, evocative but also meticulous, the compositions represent a perfect union of the aforementioned styles. All these are elements of fundamental importance for the sonic alchemy of the band. A production where pop, prog rock and jazz sensibilities are combined with a pinch of avant-garde with that sound that is typically English, but a dose of RPI also appears. The album is cleverly constructed, basically like a journey through time from the late sixties to the mid- seventies. It is important to say that the band found a perfect compositional balance and presented a transitional style between pop cheerfulness and hippie-psychedelic lightness.

So we have songs that are a little simpler, pleasant and innocent, but also the complexity and expressiveness of the music increases, and the prog elements become more prominent from song to song. One of the most important things are the well-known prog stylistic spices: odd bars, syncopation, slanted harmonies, and complex - multi-part song structure. None of the compositions are wild or aggressive, but they have sinister, strange and challenging elements. In all this, it is important to note that at no point do the songs seem overloaded, it doesn't get really heavy and really weird either, but a little fiddly in some places. The entire album is presented in a fantastic way. The whole band is constantly in great shape both on a strictly technical level and in terms of compositional taste. The solo interventions are never boring, on the contrary, they sound agile and liquid. The pieces flow rapidly alternating valuable instrumental sections, halfway between jazz/prog technique and some caressing folk references, with fantastically sung sections. Homunculus Res demonstrated all their technical and compositional skills by expanding and perfecting a personal style, jazzy but not frigid, romantic and ironic, psychedelic and colorful, but equally lucid and reasoned in every arrangement. They have succeeded in the feat of having a complex and at the same time easily assimilable sound, refined but not excessively bizarre. Pulsating intersection of jazz-rock, fairy-tale cues, an entirely "Italian" taste for melodic hooks, celestial keyboard elevations, prog leaps, pop minimalism, surreal visions, all this is inserted in a musical context, loading each piece with strangeness, layering the arrangements, zigzagging the melodic paths. The emotional vortex balances, between stylistic changes and overall themes, and all this translates into notes and sounds and presents an excellent fusion of joy and melancholy. The music is intelligent, every element is fantastically implemented, and this is a really high-quality work.