With the main intention to revive the glory of
bands such as PFM, Banco and Il Balletto di Bronzo, it is mainly Corrado
Sardella who gathered some friends around him, baptised them as Doracor and
started composing glorious melodic, analogue compositions. Sadly in all his
efforts and enthousiasm Corrado doesn’t seem to find a decent drummer,
deciding to also take the drumparts under his wings resulting in the weaker
part of the album. The album starts in an ambitious way with the 26’ long
epic ‘Cavaliere del destino’. Composed out of eleven separate parts this
piece combines operatic voices, violin, flute and bombastic keyboard
passages into a rich tapestry of musical delight. Very early in the
composition the synths already come close to the Genesis from around the
“Wind and wuthering” period. Introducing the strong female voice of
Louisa seems to be a good choice here which perfectly contrasts with violin,
guitar and keyboards. The main melody pops up all over the place making it
clear the entire album is in fact a contemporary opera in which every single
instrument takes it’s particular place in order to deliver every aspect
one associates with an opera. Certain orchestral parts come close to the
subtle aproach of Saint-Preux or the unique class of The Enid. In places
these different parts segue better into one than others so to be honest the
26’ offered here could have been a fantastic 15’ if all the unnecessary
trimmings had been thrown away before the final mix. In fact the entire album consists of just three
pieces : the aforementioned 26’43” ‘Cavaliere del destino’; the
7’12” ‘Luce ed ombra’ and the 17’44” long ‘Transizione’.
‘Luce ed ombra’ is mainly an acoustic composition where acoustic guitar,
flute and violin free the way for a more powerful approach where a
repetitive electric guitar accompanies strings and synths. The final piece
‘Transizione’ once again consists of eight individual pieces woven
together to form one large piece. The song opens with the warm mediterranean
acoustic guitar theme ‘Intro’ before some Satriani-like pyrotechnics are
demonstrated in ‘Vedere’. One can ask if the strong voice of Louisa does
indeed fit this music here as she comes close to Gianna Nanini as opposed to
delivering more mellow, more melodic vocals which would complement the music
much better. ‘Guardando lontano’ continues introducing a nice medieval
feel before more strings guide this song towards it’s instrumental grand
finale, which once again contains a fair bit of The Enid. Sure there are some tasty bits on this album but
you can hear it’s the idea of just one man, written and conceived without
the feedback of a third party. First of all the drums should have been done
by someone else whereas certain parts should have been removed alltogether.
However hopefully we have to see this Doracor as a very first effort which
benefits from critics like this one in order to shape a second album in a
much more mature way. The talent is already there so the rest shouldn’t be
too much of a problem ! Reviewed by : John
‘Bo Bo’ Bollenberg |
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