| CD REVIEW Vision Divine |
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Band : Vision Divine After the release of their previous album The 25th Hour (review posted 21/07/2007, where I also re-direct the readers to the review of 2005’s The Perfect Machine for more details on the band’s history), Vision Divine mastermind Oleg Thorsen (real name Carlo Magnini), recruited a completely new batch of musicians with keyboardist Alessio Lucatti, bassist Cristiano Bertocchi (a.k.a. Chris Breeze, and Oleg’s former collegue in Labyrinth), additional guitarist Federico Puleri, and drummer Alessandro Bissa. Together with singer Michele Luppi the band headed for the road on a heavy touring schedule, which would see the band include dates in South America, the US, and even East Asia! When, in early 2008, time came to start working on this new album, Thorsen found the cooperation with Luppi had had its best days. Actually, there had been differences from the beginning, what with Luppi’s prefered musical genres being Classic and melodic Hard Rock (say also AOR) rather than Metal, and Thorsen had even made a couple of compromises to include elements from those genres in his own music, although VD is in essence a Metal act! They’d nevertheless had a good run with three albums, but now it was time to look out for an other singer to make the step up the musical corporate ladder! The evident choice was of course Rhapsody’s Fabio Lione, who helped start up the band, sang on the first two albums, and with whom Thorsen had always worked really smoothly during the beginning of the writing process (songs are normally composed on acoustic guitar and vocals, and then thrown in front of the band to go into arrangements – little footnote: although Luppi was already a member of VD at the time, the material for the band’s 3rd album Stream Of Collaboration with Lione). He’d been forced out of VD due to contractual obligations with Rhapsody and Magic Circle Music, but now that those deals had come to pass, nothing was really in the way of a renewed collaboration. In fact, when Thorsen called him, Lione happily jumped onto the possibility to work with VD again! After a writing session, the band worked out a couple of songs and recorded a demo to shop around for a new label (remember, they wanted to climb up the corporate ladder, eh?), and after dismissing a lot of labels who were primarily interested in the fact that Lione had joined something they felt he would consider as a project to occupy himself with when not active with Rhapsody (actually they’re now called Rhapsody Of Fire), they found Frontiers not only interested in the music itself, but also capable of giving the band that extra boost in the music business! In contrast to former recordings, this new one is nót a concept album…although the lyrics of each song apparently have to do with conversations between a father and a son that was never born. After 9 songs of their own making, the band ads a very nice cover of Judas Priest’s “Touch Of Evil”…which happens to be lyrically correct in the theme of the album, by the way! As an added bonus, the label also insisted the demo version of “Fading Shadow” (which happened to be the very first song that was written & recorded with Lione) be on the album. Producer Timo Tolkki (previously guitarist of Stratovarius, now Revolution Renaisance ) is on post for the third time in a row, even if the album is basically somewhat different from the previous ones! What with the former elements of Classic Rock or AOR now completely missing, the band was able to write a true Metal album. In spite of what you might think now, this has had no effect on the overall melody, and in fact the album is more transparant than ever…not in the least thanks to Lione’s clear vocal stylings! If you’ll surf to myspace.com/visiondivineband, you’ll find 1:31 samples of 4 songs on the album…which should give you a perfect understanding of how the band sounds today! Personally, I feel VD has made a dàrn strong album which surpasses everything they’ve done before! I won’t go as far as to nominate it for my year-lists (the music is overall just a tad too slick for me), but I wíll rate it a considerable bit higher! 90/100 Tony. |
