ANTICHE IMPRESSIONI

By January 1999 Corrado Sardella had already composed and recorded a third album, each release finds him becoming even more ambitious in composing terms, this time the album ''Antiche impressioni'' was dedicated to the land of his grandparents called Monti della Laga and located somewhere in the central Apennines.The line-up was expanded to a four-piece, Sardella plays all instruments except for guitars, handled by Massimo Farina (electric) and Marco Fedele (acoustic) with a female singer named Dea contributing the soprano voice and Farina taking the over the male singing parts.The album came out on Mellow Records.

''Antiche impressioni'' is actually a long 3-part suite, reaching the 40-min. mark, and finding Sardella exploring the grounds of dreamy Symphonic Rock with emotional passages in instrumental and vocal lines and reducing a bit the virtuosic E.L.P./LE ORME tendencies, now focusing on the more melodic side of keyboard-drenched Prog Rock music.Of course that doesn't mean that Sardella has abandoned all these bombastic keyboard flashes and layers, but speaking of a 40-min. piece you will see the emphasis now being on piano interludes, Classical keyboard intros and outros, melodic guitar solos and sentimental voices with a more pronounced orchestral feel and less technical solos.As expected the music is very well-composed with the synthesizers and piano dominating the album and a few Mellotron samplers popping out, drum programming is bearable and the sporadic vocals are pretty romantic.On the other hand the sound of keyboards is not always convincing, having sometimes a pale color and weak acoustics.Nice little attempt on long, modern Sympho Rock by Sardella.At the end of the album ''Sorge il sol'' is placed, the farewell six minutes of music sound very Neo Prog-ish, a few excellent melodies, the Electronic-flavored keyboards and the distorted electric guitars combine for a very good outro.

Decent Neo/Symphonic Rock.Again some sampling methods are pretty average, but the centerpiece of the album is well-crafted, grandiose and fairly melodic.Recommended.