The title is the second line of The Waste Land: April is the cruellest month. The band name is from the same poem. Four people from Parma in their twenties, most of prog history behind them and none of it lived through, opened their first album with T.S. Eliot and closed it with a seventeen-minute piece called Horror vacui, and somewhere between those two facts they announced that Italian progressive rock had a future as well as a past. This is the debut that made the modern scene take them seriously. It went to the top of the charts it aimed at.

The short version

Their debut, recorded at the Hilary studios in Genoa in January 2013 and released that April on Mirror Records, distributed by BTF; six tracks, an hour of music, in a digipak with a sixteen-page booklet. Emanuele Tarasconi sings and plays piano, organ, Moog, Mellotron, synth, harpsichord and Theremin, and wrote the music; Francesca Zanetta plays electric and acoustic guitars and lute; Francesco Orefice plays bass and sings; Federico Bedostri plays drums and percussion. Fabio Biale guests on violin. The artistic direction is by Fabio Zuffanti, the most important producer in modern Italian progressive rock, with Rossano Villa. Two tracks pass nine minutes and the last runs nearly eighteen.

Out of the ashes of Syllogism

Tarasconi and Zanetta started the band in Parma in April 2008, out of the remains of an earlier group called Syllogism; the bassist arrived in 2010, the drummer in 2012, and a self-released EP that same year did the one thing a demo can dream of doing. It reached Fabio Zuffanti. Zuffanti — of Finisterre, La Maschera di Cera and Hostsonaten, and effectively the presiding figure of the Italian prog revival — heard something and agreed to take the artistic direction of the debut. That is the endorsement that changes a young band’s life, and it was earned rather than bought: what he was lending his name to was a group who already sounded finished. The album that resulted went straight to the top of several Italian progressive charts and put four unknowns from Emilia at the centre of the conversation.

The sound

The golden age of Italian rock, rebuilt by people who studied it rather than lived it, and imbued with a dark, theatrical, gothic atmosphere that is the band’s own. The vintage keyboards are all present — Hammond, Mellotron, Moog, harpsichord, a Theremin — and Tarasconi plays them with a virtuoso’s command while singing in the swooning, dramatic, operatic manner of the great 1970s Italian vocalists. Zanetta adds guitar grunt for the rock listeners and ethereal acoustic passages for the gothic ones; the structures are dense, the rhythm changes frequent, the lyricism unmistakably Italian. The lineage the band themselves invite is Il Balletto di Bronzo and Banco, and they can stand the comparison, which very few revival bands can. Retro instruments, contemporary mind.

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The songs

The titles are a syllabus. Dell’innocenza perduta opens on lost innocence. Atlantis carries the Latin tag conferendis pecuniis, and runs nearly ten minutes. Catabasi is subtitled descensio ad inferos, the descent into the underworld, and it is exactly what a prog band should do with that idea. Dove la luce e piu intensa was the track they filmed for the promo video, and it is the most immediate thing here. Ecate is named for the goddess of witchcraft and subtitled Walpurgisnacht, the witches’ night, and it is the album at its darkest and best. And Horror vacui closes at nearly eighteen minutes — the fear of empty space, an epic that fills every second it claims, and the piece that told everyone this was not a band that would run out of ambition. The fugue in the third track is worth the entry on its own.

Reception and legacy

It captured the international prog community almost immediately and established Unreal City as one of the brightest young bands of what people had started calling the New Wave of Italian Prog. It finished among the very best-reviewed albums of its year on the specialist sites, it was out of print quickly enough that AMS reissued it in the classic paper sleeve, and it set up everything that followed: Il paese del tramonto in 2015, which begins where this ends, and Frammenti Notturni in 2017. What it proved is the thing this whole corner of the catalogue exists to argue — that RPI is a living tradition and not a closed chapter, capable of producing a debut this assured four decades after the bands it descends from. Zuffanti backed the right group.

The verdict

Essential, and the ideal place to begin with the modern Italian scene. It is a debut with none of the tentativeness of one; if you love Banco and Il Balletto di Bronzo and assumed nobody was carrying it forward, start here and be corrected. Play Ecate and Horror vacui. Then Il paese del tramonto for the sequel, and Museo Rosenbach’s Zarathustra and Banco’s Darwin! for the ancestors these four clearly grew up on. A poem about a dead city, a witches’ night, a fear of empty space, and four people from Parma who made the old music sound urgent again.

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