Dario Lastella sent us the new album of his band If writing “Hope you’ll like it more than you liked The Stairway”. In fact three years ago, when I received "The Stairway", I was “half satisfied”: the album was too various in styles and not all the musical ideas in it convinced me.
I start this review saying that "Morpho Nestira" is really better album, much more interesting than If’s previous work. The band made a big leap, with a more accurate sound and many elements that work great despite of the tiny budget.
It’s a concept about materialism. The butterfly that names this work represents ideally the pure being, while the outer environment changes and corrupts the human being, converting everyday life in mere and mean goods. The concept ends with an optimistic note: we can reach the Ocean of Time, a place where we can fill the holes in our souls with the things that are really important in our lives.
How If express this? They use prevalently very electric sounds: we can find rock songs (“You Need”, “Oceans of Time”), flamenco and jazz rock (like the samba-flavoured rhythm on “Morpho Nestira Part 1”), almost punk numbers (“Poison”), peaceful dreamy sounds (“Unknown Eyes”), electronics (the very melodic “10 years old” and “Empty”), baroque arrangements that remind Pure Reason Revolution (“Background Noise”), epic songs in Pink Floyd style (the best song in the album “Naked” and “Thirsty” with a sax part), blues (“Learning to Communicate”) and finally a real progressive avant-garde flight (“Morpho Nestira Part 2”). The band adds ambient sounds (mobile phones, speech parts, heartbeats, etc.) to join the songs each other.
As you can imagine, many things happen in this album. Surely you can’t get bored while you’re listening to. Feelings change in a kaleidoscope of sounds.
This variety of styles could be annoying in other works, but finally it’s the added value in this one: the apparent lack of a linear style is definitively logic and coherent and the album is not annoying at all, but interesting and satisfying for the listener.
I have listened to this album many times and I really enjoyed it, because there are several parts of it that remained in my mind and I felt the need to listen to them again.
So, Dario, I like your new work much more than the previous one. Following this evolution, I believe that your next work will be better and more interesting than this already very fine one.
Do you want a mark? A solid 4 with a big + (in Polish scale), so it could be at least 8.5/10...
