The fourth album from this band from Italy.
The band is a quartet with a lineup of drums, bass, guitars, keyboards and vocals.
Some guests added acoustic guitars, flute, woodwinds, keyboards, minimoog, melotron and vocals to this album.
The band has operated with various personell since the beginning. The second album had Ellesmere as a one man band with Roberto Vitelli as the only member. He is the brain behind this band at it is his creation, his band.
Stranger Skies sees the band fully embracing a modern symphonic prog soundscape.
There is some neo-prog and electronica here too. But these two genres has been incorporated into Ellesmere's idea of how this day and age symphonic prog should sound.
That means with a lot of elegance, boldness and epic melodies.
The six pieces of music here is pretty long and the ideas is fully explored. None of the ideas is in the RPI tradition, though. Their take on symphonic prog is fully in the British tradition.
The result is a very good album indeed. An album which will set the bar pretty high for this year's prog rock albums from Italy and the rest of the world. This year arrived with one heck of a symphonic prog album.
3.5 points
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