MURALES

This album is the work by well-skilled craftmen.

We all fans have waited upon Arti's new album for more 15 years. I've expected the new one would have as aggressive sounds as previous ones, but at the moment of my first listening to it, I was confused at soft and ripe sound. Hum, they got to be older in this fifteen years...

Pleasantly, Furio's percussive sound and skill of drumming is still perfect. In the previous period, his sound is the core of them I consider, so their tradition is now alive. What I was confused at is the atmosphere and atream of the album all around. I'm sure they tried to get a lot of taste all over the world...Tango, Zamba, Bules, of course Jazz and Rock as formally. They might want to impress us that they had tried so hard to form their current style.

If so, I think the last track should NOT be necessary. This track does makes me confused, whether they wanted to make new style or hold on to the old and as-we-say-good period.

My evaluation of their effort let me give the album 2.5 stars, if there's not the last track...

Arti e Mesteri's reunion album finds them taking on a much smoother, cooler, and laid-back approach to jazz fusion. Despite the presence of a few mischevious Zappa-esque flourishes here and there to remind us of the firey and mischief-loving albums of their early career, by and large this album leans much closer to the jazz side of fusion than the rock side - but when it's jazz as beautiful and soothing as this album is at its best, I'm not inclined to complain.

Unlike many other bands, Arti e Mesteri avoid falling into the trap of making a reunion album which tries too hard to sound just like their classic-era material: instead, they've produced a piece which shows they've paid attention to developments in fusion and jazz over the course of their hiatus. The end result is a capable album which sounds like an entirely different band. It's nice, but at points the production style does feel a little cold and hollow and the group don't quite have enough strong material to fill out the running time. Indeed, they resort to rerecording their own Gravitia 9.81 from their debut album to round things off.

On balance, this is no embarrassment, but at the same time it isn't a pillar of the genre in the same way Tilt was.