** condition: (record/cover) NM/EX **

"When in 1986 they released this debut for Industrie Discografiche Lacerba they immediately appeared as one of the many Italian Tuxedomoon-oriented bands, with the (not marginal) difference compared to the others that the album was produced by Steven Brown himself. As if that were not enough, in addition to producing the album, Brown also found a way to play saxophone and piano in some tracks. The musical coordinates are therefore fixed, but, obviously, what counts above all is the raw material that fills the grooves of the album, and here we find some very interesting: 5 tracks that are very different from each other but all of a good level. It starts with “Purgatoryo“, a mid-tempo electronic drum set that marks the rhythm for a twilight pop song with vague and smoky echoes of electric jazz for an elegant incipit and wide instrumental passages that immediately make the group’s ambitions clear (we are not even very far from the solo Donald Fagen of those same years). It continues with “Preludio“, dark and static electronics that loom over a melancholic clarinet, which, in fact, preludes “Hybrid (of a tight laugh)” a song that is characterized by gothic atmospheres (martial drums, decadent voices, omnipresent noises, carpet keyboard) integrated in the second part by wind instruments in a crescendo of pain. “Lazare” is the fastest track on the album, sax and clarinet launch the main theme on the electronic drums and keyboards (all very much Tuxedo Moon) and then pass the baton to a cavernous and classically dark voice (here also assisted by a more angelic female voice) in what turns out to be the track most in line with the song form. The album closes, and is its peak, with the very long “Psiche”: a broad romantic introduction entrusted to the piano alone, with vague Mertensian echoes, from which a brief obsessive melody slowly emerges on which the clarinet is added, a moribund chorus of keyboards and, lastly, the voice riding a simple but very captivating melody with ever-decadent tones. A song that combines simplicity and intelligence in an impeccable way."