Clepsydra
More Grains Of Sand

To many, this name may not mean anything. Also because there are many productions in the progressive world, and often it's not easy to navigate, let alone follow all the bands.
This is a concept album dated 1994, the second in the band's discography, which, among other things, is not that rich: four albums in fourteen years of activity may seem few... yet, hidden within this particularity lies a great quality, which reveals the passion of a group of friends for music, the playing mainly out of passion, away from the influence of major record labels, from the obligations to work with set and mandatory deadlines, from the neuroses of success at all costs.
They don't earn their bread this way, one can infer. But if the music world could still think like this, we probably would have spared our ears from a lot of rubbish!

So, don't expect to hear anything astounding. Nothing new is invented here, there's not even the slightest intention to revolutionize or upset the musical landscape and the genre they propose. Quite the opposite. These thirteen tracks flow so homogeneously and simply that it's a wonder to listen to them! Because simplicity is precisely their strength.

I admit the singer doesn't have an excellent English pronunciation, betraying the clear Swiss-Italian origins of our artists. I also admit they borrow a bit from this and a bit from that, if we really want to delve into easy comparisons. We can find many faults if we get nitpicky. Certainly, we never find smudges, moments when a musician is led to overplay (also because the singing covers a good percentage of the whole), because, fundamentally, they have no desire to prove anything to us; there are no challenges, they leave vanity to others.

In short, if we look at the whole, we can recognize more merits than flaws in these guys. I don't feel like recommending it to those who think they have already heard everything from the genre in question. For those who, like me, remember with much nostalgia the music of those years, but especially of the previous decade, it will surely be a nice discovery and a rediscovery of that sound that many now believe to be obsolete and void like all the '80s.

I end by pointing out "No Place For Flowers," the best and most structured piece of the entire album, ideally divided into two parts, "Darkness" and "Return Of The Light."