LUXADE

Well, I´m the minority here. Maybe because I still think that good prog music should be both complex AND melodic. Maybe it would be better if I happened to know this band´s discography in chronological order. Anyway, they reached their peak so far with the beautiful and brilliant Petali Di Fuoco. The rare balance between elaborated parts and fine melodies was something that took them some time to gel. And LuxAde was part of the experiment in that direction.

Not that the album is not full of good moments. It is. And I can understand why so many other reviewers prefer La Maschera Di Cera´s more dense and complex period. After all, some progheads do favor more complicated stuff for its own sake and tend to take melodies as something suspicious (as if good melodies always meant pop music, being pop a desease to be avoided). In any case, there is no denying that this band is great. They know how to write terrific prog stuff (although they haven´t perfected it here yet), their musicanship is brilliant and their singer is simply one of the best nowadays. The lack of a electric guitar player here is a bit of a letdown, although Andrea Monetti, the flute and sax player, does a great job also, filling in several of those spaces where the guitar is surely being missed.

Again the general quality of the CD is quite even. All the tracks are good, with no real lows, but again without any discernible highlight either. Very good retro keyboards abound and that´s what I liked the most about the instrumental passages.

In the end I found this CD to be good. Sometimes very good, but still missing the great maturity they were soon to achieve by the time of Petali Di Fuoco. Final rating: somewhere between 3 and 3.5 stars.