FLEA ON THE HONEY

This is a pretty bad cd with only few redeeming qualities (far and few between). The lyrics are cheesy and the vocals are awful. some of the instrumental parts are cool but the songs are to short and it never seems like this cd flows. I'm mad at myself for wasting my time trying to track this cd down. avoid!

Proto-prog hard rock, decent period piece

This is the first album by FLEA ON THE HONEY, a quartet from Sicily but based in Rome. After this release, they shortened their name to FLEA and released the much better "Topi o Uomini" in 1972. Then they broke up for a while after some personnel changes, but the original quartet reformed in 1975 and produced a really good Jazz Rock album under the name ETNA.

This album is very far from the jazz rock style of 1975. Here there is proto-prog hard rock, with rocking guitars, interesting riffs, even some flute a la Tull. The songs are nothing special, but are not bad. In fact several are quite good--apart, that is, from the singing. They chose to sing in English, with lyrics which approach unbearable. Had they sung in their native Italian, or even kept the album largely instrumental, that would have been a great improvement. But in terms of its contemporaries, it is similar to ROVESCIO DELLA MEDAGLIA'S "La Bibbia"-- again, apart from the silly English lyrics and accent. (The band even sports English names on this one!) There are definitely signs that point to their next wonderful, more overtly progressive album, but in these short songs the approach is hard rock with prog flavoring.

The Sony/BMG mini lp is typical, with nice gatefold but little documentation (unlike the excellent booklets of the BTF mini lps)--and it is now out of print, as are all the Sony mini lps. So if you're interested, particularly as a collector of RPI, act quickly! Two stars, but I wish they were stelle . . .

This is a prehistorically release. The band was of Italian origins and that's the only link with RPI that I can see. This album is a mix of psychedelia and heavy rock. All sung in English to make the link with Italy even less obvious?

I can't be over enthusiastic about this album, even bearing in mind that almost forty years have passed between its release and this review.

Songs are mostly boring. The longest track of this album and opener "Mother Mary" sounds as a joke to me. Some weak drum solo and poor vocals are the "highlights". What comes next is no better: short pieces vaguely psyche ("King's Thoughts"? "Don't You Ever Feel Glad"), jazzy ("Happy Killer") or heavy ("Let The Flags Fly High", "Moon Park Woman") but definitively not very interesting.

You shouldn't be fooled by this inclusion: it holds very, very little to do with Italian music. Some basic rock mood and that's it. The closing "Next Election" features some short flute part and some more constructed music. But nothing too fancy to tell the truth. Two stars is well paid.

This band is probably better known for the fact that it released three albums under three different band names with each album radically different in style from the other than the music itself but nevertheless the triumvirate of FLEA ON THE HONEY / Flea / Etna is well known in small circles of lovers of 70s Italian progressive rock for this unusual evolution. Amazingly enough the three different bands featured the same lineup of the three cousins Antonio Marangolo (vocals, keyboards, flute, harmonica), Carlo Pennisi (guitar, mandolin, vocals) and and Agostino Marangolo (drums, percussion, vibraphone, vocals) who recruited Elio Volpini (bass, saxophone, guitar, vocals) to fill out the remaining band slot. Ironically the band members appeared under the nicknames Tony, Charlie, Nigel and Dustin on the first album that was entirely sung in English. The working theory is that the band's label wanted to portray them as one of many English bands coming to Italy to find success.

Starting out as FLEA ON THE HONEY, the band formed in Sicily in 1971 and then quickly moved to Rome just in time to take part in the influential Viareggio Pop Festival which immediately got its music noticed by the RCA subsidiary label Delta. The band's first album simply titled FLEA ON THE HONEY was a mix of early Italian progressive rock and late 60s heavy psych with an emphasis on guitar riffing and solos taking more influences from British bands such as Cream, Writing On The Wall and even The Jimi Hendrix Experience than the beat music that had been popular in Italy in the 1960s. With short and snappy songs more designed to produce pop hits than a prog album experience, FLEA ON THE HONEY came off as a fairly generic album of the early 1970s with melodic songs that featured the traditional rock arrangement of bass, drums and guitars with smaller roles dedicated to the flute, piano and organ.

The album featured a mixed quality with many of the tracks featuring stilted vocal performances of heavily accented English. The opening "Mother Mary" is the perfect example with rather frail lyrical deliveries and an out of place drum solo that belies the fact that the track was chosen to be released as the band's first single. The track "Happy Killer" on the other hand showcases a more confident band that had mastered that early 70s rock sound with excellent guitar riffs and a much more confident vocal performance. The FLEA ON HONEY stage of the band's existence was clearly in the realms of proto-prog which was prepping Italy for the massive leap of prog ingenuity that would sweep the nation the following year including by FLEA itself after the band shortened its name, went full on prog and switched its lyrical delivery to the Italian language.

While not the most essential release of the early Italian prog scene, FLEA ON THE HONEY nevertheless provides a much needed context of the evolution of this unbelievable band that changed its name three times with a radical stylistic shift with each album. That's not even including the short break between the final two albums where Elio Volpini left to join L'Uovo di Colombo which released a sole album before his rejoining to take Etna into the world of jazz fusion. Overall an interesting artifact from the early Italian scene that was somewhat unique for delivering an appearance of being English with a sound to match however the quality of the album while not unpleasant is far from the sophistication they would achieve the following year on "Topi O Uomini" once they shortened their name to merely FLEA. Despite the clunky vocals and silly lyrics the musicians delivered some convincing pop rock with light prog touches on FLEA ON THE HONEY making it a pleasant but ultimately nonessential release.