Nobody arrives at Metamorfosi through this record. They arrive through Inferno, the Dante concept album from the following year that turned a forgotten Roman quintet into one of the names you have to own, and then they work backwards and find this: seven songs about the creation of the world, made by a band that had spent the late sixties playing beat music in churches. It is the sound of a group one year away from knowing exactly what it is. Half of it is still 1968. The other half is already Inferno, and that half is worth the trip.

The short version

Their debut, released in May 1972 on Vedette, seven songs, about thirty-seven minutes, in a fold-out cover with the lyrics printed inside. Jimmy Spitaleri sings and plays flute; Enrico Olivieri plays organ, piano, harpsichord and synthesizer and sings; Luciano Tamburro plays guitar; Roberto Turbitosi plays bass and sings; Mario Natali plays drums. Olivieri and Spitaleri wrote all of it, words and music. It is the only Metamorfosi album with a guitarist on it.

Rome, 1969

The origin is genuinely unusual. Spitaleri, a Sicilian with an enormous near-operatic voice, joined a Roman group called I Frammenti who specialised in the messe beat — the beat masses that briefly flourished in Italy after the Second Vatican Council, in which religious texts were set to rock arrangements and played inside the liturgy. That is the soil this band grew in, and it explains the album entirely: the biblical framework, the choral instinct, the organ everywhere, the complete absence of the leftist politics that ran through most of the Italian scene. They spent 1970 and 1971 on the Roman circuit turning the beat songs into something longer and more classical, cut a first single in 1971, and signed to Vedette — a label with almost no interest in rock, which is a large part of why so few people heard any of this.

The sound

Two things dominate and everything else gets out of the way. The first is Spitaleri, a huge, declamatory, faintly liturgical voice that belongs in the same conversation as Di Giacomo, Tagliapietra and Di Palo — a lot of Italian listeners put him there. The second is Olivieri, who plays organ the way a church organist plays it, in blocks, with harpsichord and piano and the occasional Moog for colour, and who writes the harmony for the whole group. Turbitosi and Natali are heavier and more forward than you expect. Tamburro’s guitar, honestly, is barely there, and when he left at the end of 1972 the band did not bother replacing him. Compared with Inferno the writing here is still in song shapes, three to five minutes, with the seams showing.

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The songs

Il sesto giorno opens on the creation itself and sets the tone: organ, drums, and Spitaleri at full height. ...E lui amava i fiori is the one people quote, a gentle melodic ballad that Italian fans routinely file next to Le Orme’s Gioco di bimba and PFM’s Impressioni di settembre — if you only play one track, play this. Crepuscolo and Nuova luce carry the record’s light-and-dark scheme. Hiroshima is the album turning to look at what people did with the world they were given; it is handled as lament rather than reportage. Sogno e realta is the melancholy one and the other keeper. Inno di gloria closes with the choral hymn the whole thing has been heading towards from the first bar — a little obvious, and it still works on most listeners.

Reception and legacy

It sold very little. Vedette pressed it, put a black and silver label on it and largely left it there, and the album is now rare enough that clean originals reach four figures; the reissues came much later. At the end of 1972 Tamburro and Natali both left, Gianluca Herygers came in on drums, and the band went into Inferno as a quartet with no guitar — which sold around ten thousand copies and made the reputation this record now lives inside. The fair verdict is the one Italian critics reached long ago: fragmentary, uneven, still tied to the song, with the sixties audible at the edges. The unfair one is to skip it, because two or three of these songs are as good as anything the band did.

The verdict

Not the place to start — start with Inferno, always — but the first place to go afterwards, and better than its reputation among people who have not played it. Try ...E lui amava i fiori and Sogno e realta first and let the rest follow. Then Le Orme’s Uomo di pezza for the same melodic instinct, and Banco for the same kind of voice. Metamorfosi came back decades later to finish what they had started, with Paradiso in 2004, a church-organ live album in 2011 and Purgatorio in 2016, closing the Dante trilogy roughly forty years after opening it. This is where the voice arrives.

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