Alex Carpani – Microcosm (2022)
I lost interest in Alex Carpani after the 2014 album “4 Destinies”. That was his last progressive rock album. After that, he switched to a pop sound influenced by new wave and electronica. On his new album, Microcos, Carpani has brought together a mix of progressive rock-leaving pieces, pop and AOR.
The first two songs on the album have a progrock flavor, especially track 1, which a modernized version of the King Crimson classic “Starless”. Track two sounds like some of the proggier works by Billy Sherwood.
The following four tracks go into a pop and 1980s-style radio friendly rock direction.
On “Primer Numbers”, Carpani brings back progressive sounds, injecting finely-crafted jazz fusion. The rest of the album consists of pop-rock songs with an occasional interesting keyboard solo.
“Microcosm” includes guest performances by violinist David Cross (former King Crimson), saxophonists Theo Travis (Soft Machine, Steven Wilson, David Gilmour) and David Jackson (former Van der Graaf Generator), vocalist Jon Davison (Yes), drummer Bruno Farinelli, bassist Andrea Torresani, and guitarists Davide Rinaldi and Emiliano Fantuzzi.
Alex Carpani said about the album, “The album concept is philosophical and existential and concerns our life, our ‘personal universe’ regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristics of something much larger. Musically speaking I wanted to give this idea of a ‘human universe’ with its variety and contradictions, so Microcosm is very different from the 5 albums I previously released and has a richness and variety of instruments and artists on it: 9 musicians involved and as many parts including lead and backing vocals, various saxes, flute, lead synths, Mellotron, Hammond organ, piano, drums, bass, guitars, drum loops and electronics. Carlo Gnocchi, an Italian educator and writer, said that ‘Every human being is an unmistakable and autonomous microcosm’”.