Echotime
Genuine

When Saturday Night Fever was all the rage, I was buying records of Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull; at university, instead of getting excited about Duran Duran, I was delighted with Rush and discovering the early Metallica...then work, marriage, children; no more heavy music, my wife didn't like it, so it was on with Elton John and The Lion King, light pop, and singer-songwriters.

Then one spring ten years ago, a young colleague piqued my curiosity by talking to me about "progressive-metal"; I went to see a Swedish band passing through Milan, a representative of this musical genre.

I made this preamble because as I approach reviewing "Genuine," the first thing that comes from my heart is: "here are the Pain of Salvation of our own!" And you can understand that it was Gildenlow and company who had rekindled the sacred metallic fire dormant under the ashes.

Saying this perhaps doesn't do a great service because the Echotime are not derivative of any other group in particular, but it's a fact that with this record, I rediscovered the pleasure of those atmospheres that excited me ten years ago.

Sure, they don't invent anything new, but they elegantly take up the good things done in the genre over the years, avoiding the characteristics for which it is often denigrated: coldness, prolixity, and excessive technicism for its own sake.

Putting the CD in the player, I find myself listening to a product that is not at all "raw" and approximate, as I might expect from a band at their first record production.

In short, Echotime started with a bang: such a mature and balanced work I would have expected on the third or fourth try, not at the debut (Metropolis II came after 10 years, Operation Mindcrime was the fourth release, A Pleasant Shade of Gray came out mid-career, to make examples of monuments of the genre).

Instead, we are in the presence of a work of remarkable compositional depth and magnificently produced.

Technically, it's a concept album that tells a fanciful story with a steam-punk setting but anchored to current themes. I haven't gone into details, but it seems to tell of a brilliant boy who discovers a substance/formula that could resolve humanity's fate, and for this, he is hindered by those who instead benefit from the degradation of a corrupt world on the brink of the abyss.

The music reflects well this dark and oppressive atmosphere and follows the events narrated like the soundtrack of a movie.

Famous celebrities have tried their hand at this kind of songwriting, starting with the Pink Floyd of The Wall or, more recently, the Ayreon project, but here the music is fully at the service of the story, functional to the events narrated; it flows fluid and hard, interspersed with spoken interludes, voices from old-era radios, Gregorian chants, environmental noises that do not break the rhythm but instead create the perception of a suite with no apparent solution of continuity, whereas the main tracks are well distinct and are pleasant to listen to even individually: “The Choice,” “Show your faces on TV” (the central chorus is nice like Savatage), “Breaking the Prayers,” Echoes (here something of Ashes, of the aforementioned PoS), In Rebel Hands, the instrumental “Genuine 10:10” and the conclusive but interlocutory “The Question” are my favorites.

To find a nitpick, I could point out that in some passages the English pronunciation of the singing is not perfect, but these are details. Alex Cangini's voice is moreover a strength of the work: personal, not banal, very recognizable, it has something of John Oliva, of Jorn, or even of Thomas Englund from Evergrey: that expressive roughness that I generally prefer to the homologated clarity.

I find it praiseworthy that the individual songs do not exceed the length and the entire work does not surpass 50 minutes; there are no dead spots or unnecessary fillers and at the end of the listening, there's a desire to start the CD from the beginning.

Musically, it is clear that the guys are very prepared, close-knit, and put a lot of passion into it; live, they have cut their teeth playing covers around Italy (thus they make ends meet and have fun), but the time has come for them to really take flight.