MALEDETTI

Fourth Studio album, Maledetti is an improvement over the absolutely obtuse CRA album and its improvised atonal music, yet it takes as much from that album and "Crac!" whose bright jazz rock was illuminating the peninsula. So using the median between the two conduct line Maledetti is a concept album about "what if" and was packed inan impressive medical gatefold.

Besides the whacky opening short Evarorazione, an eccentric Stratos vocal affair, the album starts well enough un the ultra-funky and mega-technical Diforisma Urbano , sounding a bit like Jeff Beck's Wired album, Stratos intervening as if his voice was just another synth (some of the most effective scat I've heard, since you might actually miss them) in this red-hot fusion of molten rocks. Gerontacrazia is one of the weirder track on this album at least in its first half, hovering between the dissonant and absolutely mad, then suddendly veering again fusion, (beck and hammer seems to be again the influence), but Stratos' vocals ensure that you couldn't mistake them for another band. Scum is very close tio free-jazz, often teetering wioth the dissonant demented line >> this track is probably the closest to their Radiation album, along with the closing and aptly named Caos (second part), which retuirns to Area's maddening free-improv side.Beside a useless but thankfully short Massacro Di Brandeburgo, Giro Rondo reaches another red hot fusion, but it took its time to get there via some excellent and cradual progressions and implacable chord succession. There is an unwelcomed bonus track in the form of a live interview which turns chaotic, as Stratos pushes his provications;

Please don't be fooled by my fellow reviewers twho claim that Area is misplaced in jazz-rock, but thios album is filled with it as there were previous ones and when not JR/F, then they veer free-jazz with a touch of RIO ( I can see Area signing the Rhe chart just as easily as Stormy Six did, both bands sharings fairly similar aesthetics.