UT is the old name for the note we call C — the first note, the ground everything is built from. It is also the last record the classic New Trolls made before they tore themselves in half, and a lot of people will tell you it is the best thing they ever did. Both statements are true and they are connected. This is a band at the peak of its powers and in the middle of an argument it could not settle: one guitarist pulling towards hard rock, the other pulling towards everything else, and eight tracks in which you can hear the argument being had.

The short version

Recorded across two stretches in November 1972 at the Fonit-Cetra studios in Milan and out by the end of the year, on Cetra, in a laminated fold-out sleeve. Eight tracks, back in Italian after the all-English album that came before it. Nico Di Palo plays lead guitar and sings almost all of it; Maurizio Salvi plays piano, organ, Eminent and synthesizer; Frank Laugelli plays bass; Gianni Belleno plays drums and sings; Vittorio De Scalzi plays guitar, and that is very nearly all he does. The band produced and arranged it themselves. Look at the writing credits and De Scalzi’s name is not there at all.

The argument

De Scalzi had walked out once already and come back, and for this record he gave up the role he had held since 1967 — the band’s writer — and turned up as a guitarist, appearing properly on one song. That left Di Palo, Belleno, Laugelli and Salvi to make the album, with two outside lyricists, and it left the group with a centre of gravity that had moved hard towards Di Palo. Salvi, classically trained, had been circling the band for a while and finally joined outright. Laugelli, an Italian-Canadian from Toronto, had replaced Giorgio D’Adamo on the previous record. When it was over Di Palo took the hard-rock road and formed Ibis, taking Salvi with him; De Scalzi went the other way and had to call his group N.T. Atomic System because the name was now a legal problem. Listening to how well these five play together, it is genuinely hard to believe.

The sound

Two things at once, welded rather than blended. Salvi is the first: piano and organ writing that is openly Emerson-facing, classical miniatures used as structure rather than ornament, and he opens the album by reworking a piano study by Johann Baptist Cramer. Di Palo is the second, and 1972 had taught him what a distorted guitar could do — there are riffs here that would not be out of place on an early Black Sabbath record, and his soloing goes on far longer than good taste requires, which is exactly why people love it. Belleno and Laugelli are ferocious. The vocals are Di Palo’s, and this is the album that made his case as one of the great Italian prog voices. It is harder than the Concerto Grosso, less elegant, and considerably more alive.

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The songs

Studio opens on Salvi’s Cramer rework and runs straight into XXII strada, under two minutes of jazz-waltz for piano and guitar. Then I cavalieri del lago dell’Ontario, the one to hear first: marching drums, flute, and a doomed narrative set in the Canadian woods, written by the bass player who actually came from there. Storia di una foglia is the pastoral three minutes. Nato adesso starts at the piano and turns into a guitar solo that refuses to end, and it is glorious. C’e troppa guerra takes the whole of side two’s opening at nearly ten minutes and is the heaviest thing in the New Trolls catalogue, an anti-war piece delivered as a wall of riff. Paolo e Francesca goes to Dante for its lovers and back to melody. Chi mi puo capire closes on organ and a slow rise.

Reception and legacy

Divisive at the time, canonical now. The standard Italian verdict puts UT among the peaks of the whole scene — some rank it above the Concerto Grosso, on the grounds that the Concerto needed Bacalov and this is entirely the band’s own. The dissent is that it is uneven, a superb record with a couple of passengers, and that the two halves of the group never quite agree inside a single track. Both readings survive contact with the album. What is not in dispute is what happened next: this was the end of the classic line-up, and everything after it — Ibis, N.T. Atomic System, the lawsuits, the 1976 reunion, the decades of rival New Trolls — flows from the argument this record is having with itself. Laugelli, Salvi and Belleno all went on; De Scalzi died in 2022.

The verdict

Essential, and the one to reach for after the Concerto Grosso — not before, because the Concerto is the door, but immediately after, because this is the room. Play I cavalieri del lago dell’Ontario and Nato adesso, in that order, and if the second one lands you will want the whole thing. Then Ibis’ Sun Supreme for where Di Palo and Salvi took it, Il Balletto di Bronzo’s Ys for the same year done darker, and Osanna for the same heaviness done Neapolitan. A band splitting up rarely leaves this good a reason to be sorry about it.

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