ID
Where Are We Going

Vivid is the memory of that day back in 1987 when I bought three LPs at the record store in San Lorenzo, Rome, all of which shared a cover made of slightly thicker and rougher cardboard than usual, so much so that it raised doubts that they might be bootlegs: this one, Happy Dragon Band (which I reviewed), and Randy Holden's "Population II," marking the Epiphany I brought home that day. Three records that monopolized my listening for several months.

Noticing a subtle line that united them in defiling rock, I observed happy deviations close to my nature: they were art-thug records where a spatial neighborhood rampaged unpunished. And precisely the work of ID pushes the accelerator on intense extraterrestrial atmospheres, reinforced by the flying saucer that appears on the back cover.

Here too, you hear this stuff and can't quite say what you've heard, a mixture of rock, electronics, and never predictable progressive atmospheres, inlaid with guitars crafted on some ring of Saturn. And everything emerges from the canonical instruments of rock, but the mix is a bit different from usual, the Oickle brothers and company expertly shake their space cocktail. Music for an unknown ritual, for a need to project outside the prison of the biological vehicle. The delivery is not in the least haughty; rather, it is suggestive in inviting us not to accept abstruse elitist conditioning.

The long suite straddling the two sides magnificently meanders through a journey that will fulfill our listening pleasure and communicate to us that we don't need to go too far to find who-knows-what, we just need to hop onto the spaceship of these American lads who in that mid-'70s knew "where they were going," really pulling off something big.