CHAINS

For several years now I have the habit to play this album every once in a while and every time I come to the same conclusion. Initially I feel this is just a good album deserving three stars but when I go through the whole experience my admiration is growing and growing...

And that's the spearhead of this review: what will be the ultimate rating ? The trick is the album starts off rather cliche with typical neosongs; the songs are very good but a bit unexiting and unmoving. But with the second half they raise their level of composing and executing music and every time I take leave of this release with a puzzled mind: how good is this actually ?

Ricocher plays downright neoprog in early Marillion style without flagrantly cloning them. The guitar sounds quite heavy but it goes way too far to suggest them for the heavy prog subgenre. That's in a nutshell what the band is about. The level of compositions is on average between very good and excellent and so is the execution (both vocals and instruments). The execution is even a bit neat, it's near perfect and if you don't like this kind of smoothness maybe you should forget about Chains. But if you're a fan of this way of performing you should absolutely go for this release. So in the end I will have to go with my PA friend and collegue Tarcisio who is the only reviewer who awarded this album with four stars. It's slightly rounded up though due to being a bit unoriginal. But the quality is top notch so four it is (3,75).