Lione/Conti - Lione/Conti

Published January 27 2018

*=Staff's pick	Ascension* Outcome* You're Falling Somebody Else Misbeliever Destruction Show Glories Truth* Gravity Crosswinds

Genre	Power Metal	Fabio Lione	Vocals
Tracks	10	Alessandro Conti	Vocals
Running time	46 Min.	Simone Mularoni	Guitar
Label	Frontiers Music	Simone Mularoni	Bass
Release	January 26, 2018	Marco Lanciotti	Drums
Country	Italy	Filippo Martignano	Keyboards
Producer	Simone Mularoni
Similar bands	Kamelot

The respected Italian power metal vocalists Alessandro Conti of Trick Or Treat and formerly of Luca Turilli's Rhapsody and Fabio Lione of Rhapsody, Angra and formerly of Rhapsody Of Fire have teamed up for another collaboration staged by Frontiers Music between pretty well-known singers or musicians and this time it's supervised by DGM guitarist and producer Simone Mularoni. The validity, integrity and dignity of these types of carefully organized and well-structured projects might of course be questioned out of a certain aspect by the fans to these guys since the chance of getting to catch a live performance from this group is probably somewhere in the vicinity of zero, zip and nothing.

Since this record obviously is named after two singers, the vocals are naturally of great importance to the end result and when exclusively listening to their tone of voice it's arguably close to flawless. Nevertheless, I wouldn't mind if the pronunciation of short and long vowels were improved on some occasions over the record and in such a situation I actually come to wonder how it's even possible that no one perceives this matter during or after the recordings of the vocals and just redo those particular sections, because we're not talking about weeks of work to correct it and this whole thing could be long gone and forgotten about in just a few hours by simply laying down new stuff in some line here and there.

What I hear musically is pretty bombastic power metal for the most part, even if it's not an attempt to come out as grandiose and over-epic to the extreme as a lot of metal bands might do when there is great participation of Italians in the roster. This one isn't what I would call a versatile effort and even if the individual songs don't originate from the exact same kind of formula it gets just a little bit repetitive in a sense when listening to the entire album repeatedly. Yet, to be fully honest it's somewhat varied too because some day along the road perhaps Thomas Youngblood of Kamelot will ask for a 'thank you' for being the clear inspiration to a couple of verses and choruses on this record.

I like what I hear though and this project is surely successful in terms of bringing forth good songs with quality vocals and I wouldn't mind if these guys did eventually set up a goal of transforming this maybe short-lived group to a real cohesive band. They certainly have most of the ingredients musicians need to come out with strong power metal music and this first try definitely looks promising for a future partnership as well.

Performance	Originality	Production	Vocals	Songwriting
6	4	7	8	7

Summary
7 chalices of 10 - Tobbe