Luca Turilli's Dreamquest - Lost Horizons

*=Staff's pick	Introspection Virus* Dreamquest Black Rose Lost Horizons Sospiro Divino Shades Of Eternity Energy* Frozen Star Kyoto's Romance Too Late Dolphin's Heart Gothic Vision*

Genre	Symphonic Metal	-	Vocals
Tracks	13	Dominique Leurquin	Guitar
Runningtime	54 Min.	-	Guitar
Label	Magic Circle Music	Sascha Paeth	Bass
Release	12 June 2006	Robert Hunecke-Rizzo	Drums
Country	Italy	Luca Turilli	Keyboards
Similar artists	Within Temptation, Nightwish

Luca Turilli's Dreamquest is yet another band that Rhapsody mastermind Luca Turilli has formed on the side of everything else he has going on in order to have another channel for all musical ideas he has which do not fit in either Rhapsody or his own solo project. In Dreamquest, however, he only plays keyboard and nothing else and he does it good, I might add. It is a powerful and majestic sound landscape he creates, similar to what he had on Prophet Of The Last Eclipse but even more abstract and spacy with plenty of gothic and even industrial elements, if only in a couple of songs with the latter. The guitar is playing, if you excuse the expression, second fiddle here. They create a steady rhythm as base and the keyboard takes care of the rest. The guitar solos and melodies are very few.

Musical references are Theatre Of Tragedy, the just mentioned Prophet Of The Last Eclipse-album, equal parts of Within Temptation and Nightwish (Frozen Star bears an uncanny similarity in the chorus), and bits and pieces from most modern metal/goth bands. The sound and the ambience are great but the songs do not reach all the way. The riffs, verses and mood are very good captured and well performed but the really good hooks and refrains are absent and leaves a feeling of "it could have been so much better...". All I think about when listening to this is how powerful and mighty it is but when each song fades out I wonder where the melodies where. There is not much on the album that really grab hold of me, only fragments and bits and pieces of songs.

The album also loses a bit of it's power and momentum in the midsection due to a few pretty charachterless and boring slow songs (Sospiro Divino, Shades Of Eternity) but the album picks up again toward the end and crosses the finish line with its head up. The vocals are female soprano, performed splendidly by a person unknown to me at the time of writing this review (as well as most of the other musicians since that info is not included with the promo, but I will add the names later as they are revealed) and are perhaps not technically top notch but have charachter and something special to them and range from clear and beautiful opera to a little rougher rock vibe. Highlights are of course the slightly uptempo songs since slow bits and operatic ballads from Turilli have a tendancy to take one step too much over the cheesy barrier.

At the end of the day a partly enjoyable album and I will most likely come back to this one every now and then. It's a nice acquaintance and I hope for a continuation and a development. It has potential to reach much higher but as it is now no song reaches all the way, but Virus, Black Rose, Energy (ABBA, anyone...?) and Gothic Vision have good potential. Either the songs have a great verse and/or riff, a majestic chorus, very good keyboard parts and sound - but never everything at the same time to make those really great songs. If there would be more Rhapsody sounding refrains as in Gothic Vision in more industrial sounding songs like Virus, this could have been a monster.

And on top of everything else this man has going on, we can already now on the website for this band read that Luca is already finishing composing the songs for the second Dreamquest album. Perhaps he is slightly overworking everything and have to many fingers involved in too many things at the moment?

Production	Vocals	Compositions
9	8,5	5

Summary
5,5 chalices of 10 - Tommy