Detailed Reviews [Doracor - 2005 - "Evanescenze"]

Prolusion. DORACOR is a contemporary Italian band, whose discography counts four studio albums to date: "Segni Premonitori" (1998), "Antiche Impressioni" (1999), "Tranzione" (2001) and "Evanescenze" (2005), which is the object of this review and is my first acquaintance with their creation. Having picked up the band's bio on their website, I've learned that Doracor's lineup was never really stable, Corrado Sardella remaining the only founding member at the moment.

Analysis. Prior to listening to the CD, I was wondering why there are the whole five guitar players in the band now, all being credited as full-time members, expecting to hear a driving guitar-based sound. Nope. There's nothing of the sort. The author of the entire material Corrado Sardella, playing keyboards, and also synthy-bass and programmed drums (perhaps manually), bosses practically throughout, some pieces being performed by him alone. The electric guitar is part of the picture on most of the tracks, but the overall sound is normally keyboard-based, the number of instrumental compositions noticeably exceeding that of songs. In other words, this album can in many ways be viewed as Sardella's solo project with the partial employment of the other musicians credited. The man is an excellent keyboard player and is not a mediocre songwriter, but the synthetic rhythm-section somewhat shades his compositional and performance talent. The 45-minute "Evanecscenze" is a suite (rather, quasi suite), consisting of 18 parts-sections, only three of which exceed 3 minutes in duration, which, though, is not a big deal as a matter of fact. But since much of the music unfolds and develops logically, with no pauses between tracks in addition, it's sometimes hard to notice when the next piece begins without looking at the CD player's display. The suite's eighteen parts are eleven instrumental pieces and seven songs, differentiating for the most part only by the complexity level, although three instrumentals: Intro, Nostalgia Implosione and Affreschi di Tempo feature no other instruments but keyboards. The music ranges from, say, a classically full-fledged, diverse and powerful, symphonic Art-Rock with a light classical sense and a touch of Metal in places to the mellower, melodically pronounced, symphonic stuff, which is not Neo though, at least because Doracor has no problems with originality. I have especially written down which of the pieces refers to one or another of said directions, but it would be too long to list all of them here. I'd only note that being taken separately (and it's hard to perceive them in a different way), most of the vocal-based tracks don't seem to be notable for a particular diversity, leaning towards the latter category. The very best compositions turned out to be the two longest tracks: L'Eterna Visione and L'Inizio, the former coming with some vocals, and, surprisingly, the shortest one, E la Fine I Vortice, featuring a blistering organ solo, like a mountain-skier maneuvering between the edgy and ever changing location of 'rocks' built by guitar riffs and the rhythm section. This 1-minute piece is such incredibly eventful and cohesive that I would have hardly believed in that if I had not heard it. Featuring relatively little guitar solos, L'Inizio is the one in the set whose sound appeared to be not completely unfamiliar to me, resembling a bit of early Rick Wakeman.

Conclusion. Doracor's "Evanescenze" is an original and quite impressive music, although in its overall appearance it is a bit lacking of cohesiveness, due to the slightly unreasoned construction of the album as such. To get the stuff appearing as a more large-scaled palette, Sardella should have divided the suite into the lesser number of parts, particularly so that the songs had not been separated from the instrumental sections that precede or follow them. Well, this is a remark from a lover of intricate Prog with, preferably, extended musical landscapes, while those browsing between an accessible and moderately complex symphonic Art-Rock might get a lot of pleasure from this recording.

VM: December 13, 2005