Pallas
The Dreams of Men

Sometimes we bring home CDs that, after a few listens, turn out to be not very happy purchases. This is one of those cases. It's not nice to judge starting from the end, but to review this work I must necessarily give a judgment ignoring the past Pallas: this name, to most, won’t mean anything; to lovers of the genre, like the writer, it is associated with the new progressive typically from the 80s. How much water has passed under the bridge! Many of those bands no longer exist; the survivors are divided between those who have tried to reinvent themselves in various ways and with varying fortunes, those who remained faithful to that period, and those struggling to keep up with the times. Our guys try to keep their feet in all these shoes. Attempting, with various contrivances, to reshuffle the cards to give new life to their music. Even if the effort is appreciable, in some ways it also reveals the creative limit. Because they, like those who have already traveled this path, attempt the turning point by taking a road too easy: that which leads to good hard rock (a genre with which those who end up in this cauldron/limbo are labeled, where there's a bit of everything: but if the definition doesn't suit you, call it AOR or whatever you like, the tune is still the same!).  Throughout the album, there is the presence of keyboards that often wander between symphonic and gothic with bursts of cathedral sacred music; there is space for a gentle lady's voice, vaguely operatic in style, which indeed occupies massively the second part of the concluding "The Last Angel"; and also a gospel choir in "Messiah," the singing of a Native American shaman in "Ghostdancer," while in "Northern Star," completely unrelated to the context, it seems that Mike Oldfield is the special guest, even though he does not appear in the booklet credits. Probably, our guys wanted to set up a musical discourse linked to dreams, the dream world in general, reaching between ethnic and cultural at 360°. Not taking into account the tangible risk of ending up creating a product, however, not homogeneous. But at the end of all this nice talk, where’s the progressive? We have to wait for "Too Close To The Sun" to get an answer. As for the rest, it's not that there are no traces: indeed, but they are thrown here and there, almost to please the die-hard fan. The rest is honest music, good individual performances, but nothing to shout a miracle about. The road leading to a less uncertain future is still steep, my dear ones!