DPRP

“…the album opens with waves and seagulls

and a female voice humming a little tune

which is taken over by synthesiser and

Mellotron before punchy, hard rock guitars

kick in."

"It is a nice opening for a melodic hard prog track, and of an album of

accessible music… a solid

album of melodic hard rock, with some prog elements!...”

Happy birthday, Sintonia Distorta! The band celebrated its 20th anniversary in October, having been founded in 1995 and hailing from Lodi in Lombardy. The band started its career by playing covers from hard rock and heavy metal bands and eventually decided to develop its own style and record original material. Frammenti d'Incanto is the band's first "official" album, the band having released only a demo and a mini-CD named Anthemyiees (which is also the opening track of this album).

Five of the six tracks from Anthemyiees are also included on Frammenti d'Incanto, but seem to have been rearranged and re-recorded to sound somewhat different and more professional.

The line-up on this album consists of Simone Pesatori (vocals), Simone Prestini (electric and acoustic guitars – although the band does not rely on the latter to a very large extent), Giampiero Manenti (keyboards, backing vocals), Fabio Tavazzi (bass), and Matteo Sabbioni (drums – having been replaced by Luca Nava in the meantime).

The band's website, which understandably, but unfortunately for me is only in Italian, contains lots of information, including preferred artists and songs of each of the band's members. Influencing bands mentioned include Iron Maiden, Metallica, Deep Purple, Rush, Journey. I would add some others such as Uriah Heep, Europe and Zucchero, indicating that Sintonia Distorta can be pigeon-holed amongst the melodic hard rock genre with prog leanings.

The album opens with waves and seagulls and a female voice humming a little tune which is taken over by synthesiser and Mellotron before punchy, hard rock guitars kick in. It is a nice opening for a melodic hard prog track, and of an album of accessible music.

Overall, the song structures are not overly complex and there is a good balance between guitar and keyboards. Whilst the former provides the hard rock elements, the latter accounts for the prog aspects of Sintonia Distorta's sound. I especially liked the frequent use of organ.

Most of the songs are on the harder edge, with only a couple which come close to ballads: Menta e Fragole and I Ponti di Budapest. Both show very strong melodies, the chorus of the former having true earworm character, and a broader spectrum of Simone Pesatori's voice – sometimes aggressive, sometimes mellow. If only he was that varied in all the other songs.

That leads me to a bit of a downer concerning this album. Whilst the music is melodic, catchy and well-produced, slight feelings of monotony creep in upon repetitive listening, a sort of acoustic déjà-vu. Rhythmically, the guitar riffing is quite uniform, with all the songs in four-four-time, and the sequence of chords showing similarities across the various songs. I also believe that there is more potential in Simone Pesatori's singing than is displayed on this album. Don't get me wrong, the musicianship is flawless, but I would appreciate a bit more of variety concerning the song structures and the melodies, even more so as this album has over 68 minutes of running time. The exceptions are the two ballads mentioned above. I also enjoyed the catchy and slightly more prog metal-like Pioggia di Vetro. Played and heard live, their music probably would be somewhat more appealing to me.

Sintonia Distorta have released a solid album of melodic hard rock with some prog elements. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that and it shows that not every band hailing from Italy is in the typical symphonic Rock Progressivo Italiano and PFM and Banco vein. I hope that their album-releasing frequency will be accelerated a bit and I look forward to checking out what a successor album will sound like.