DGM
Dreamland

With as many as six albums released in just over 10 years, DGM represents one of the best acts in Italy when it comes to progressive metal. Always compared to sacred monsters like Dream Theater and Symphony X, the Roman band has shown the ability, album after album, to grasp the lessons of the greats in the genre, always reinterpreting them in their own way. This is how works like "Hidden Place" or "Misplaced" (just to name two) were born, all endowed with extremely recognizable melodies, albeit anchored in the typical tradition of American-style melodic progressive metal.

Although many bands over time reach a high level of compositional ability that allows them to create albums of great quality, with DGM the pinnacle of their career was reached, in my humble opinion, in 2001 when they brought forth the beautiful "Dreamland", an album in which touching melodies and instrumental digressions typical of progressive coexist in perfect balance that never seem out of place or excessive.
The melodic research and the introduction of hard rock, gothic, and melodic elements on the edge of pop make this "Dreamland" even more delightful, and it is from the blending of the various genres that pearls of great charm are born, like the opening "Dreamland", 7 minutes and 3 seconds of instrumental evolutions where Diego Reali’s guitars meet with the keyboards (and this is where the gothic element comes into play, although some choruses throughout the album also highlight this trend towards gothic metal) of Maurizio Pariotti, all supporting the crystal-clear and splendid voice of Titta Tani, truly in great form. The slight vocal distortions, which give the song an extra touch of elegance, are very well-executed.

Also worth mentioning is the splendid ballad "The Rain Falls In The Desert", delicate in its melancholic progression. The song opens with a gentle piano framework that marks the piece's main theme, then gives way to Reali's solo, to which Titta’s warm voice is linked, engaged in reciting sweet words of love.
There’s something for everyone’s tastes in the album, and thus appear more conventional yet beautiful tracks like the last two "Sweet Surrender" and "Feeling Forever", clearly indebted to Dream Theater's brand of prog metal, all reworked and revised, however, in a DGM key, meaning more speed, more pathos in the interpretation of the song, and above all more linearity (instrumental digressions without a head or tail typical of Petrucci & Co.'s LATEST works seem "forbidden"), making the tracks much more appealing even to those not particularly accustomed to certain sounds. For the rest, the platter moves on coordinates mostly similar to the described tracks, resulting quite dynamic and compact, maintaining a compositional quality that remains more or less constant and without evident drops in style.

As for the album's recording, the quality does not reach the results of the music within, revealing some flaws, including the volume of the instruments not perfectly balanced, but also the drum sound appearing somewhat fake at several points (the snare drum sounds like it’s made of plastic and the cymbal sound comes and goes) and, last but not least, the voice seems occasionally drowned in the music, not doing justice to one of the best voices in the Italian metal field.

If you can overlook these "particularities," I assure you, however, that you can enjoy a record of no small charm that will be able to capture you from the first listen.