Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: October 18, 2024
Production: Simone Mularoni
Album length: 56. 27 min
Genre: Progressive Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
DGM are, we can safely say today, legendary Italian progressive metallers who got going in the mid-nineties of the last millennium! Over the past five years they’ve found a drive that just won’t dry up: “Endless” is already their third studio album in that stretch, which is normally unheard of in the genre this band works in. With DGM, though, things are different. The band is riding a massive wave of creative inspiration, and they’ve got so much momentum right now that you could slice it into thick hunks of bread. It’s what delivered the band and its followers a brand-new studio album less than a year after “Life” came out in mid-November 2023!
DGM are a band that creates under the spell of progressive metal icons Dream Theater. Given the band’s DNA, that makes perfect sense. But they do things their own way. They stay remarkably listenable, and that’s despite the heaps of theatrics they pull off in all kinds of crazy, flawlessly executed maneuvers of jaw-dropping, technically complex ‘complicating’. So this ‘luxury’ doesn’t escape the latest studio effort “Endless” either. It’s not allowed to be any other way. Otherwise the band’s fans would, at the very least, ‘lynch’ them.
The album “Endless” is a concept piece. It follows a man who sets off on an imaginary journey, asking himself what his life would look like if he had made different choices at the pivotal moments along the way. Plenty of you will probably recognize yourselves in some of his imaginary stories.
DGM are an incredibly seasoned crew. They hardly ever miss. In every respect. The sound was once again shaped by the outstanding guitar virtuoso, arranger and producer Simone Mularoni. The sound keeps an organic liveliness and warmth. The guitar phrasing is often wrapped in the warmth of keyboard lines that imitate the Hammond sound. As for the arrangements, everything is once again exactly where it should be. As with the previous albums, including the excellent predecessor “Life” (2023), “Endless” is the epitome of the best you can demand and expect from DGM. The pomp of the drama theater the band creates through moods and shifting layers of lead motifs, with no shortage of switching between fast and slow parts, works with the familiar splendor of masterful ‘overdoing it, Italian-recipe style’. That’s exactly the album’s greatest charm. The musical melodies, ruled by the fantastic Marco Basile, are woven into progressive metal playing, where Mularoni’s razor-sharp guitar acrobatics and Emanuele Casali’s superior keyboard sensibility join hands in a cunningly balanced dialogue. And running through all of it is a touch of polished neo-classical figures, which are ever-present on the band’s new release too. The album thus speaks in a symphonic, even operatic, extremely bombastic voice, and given the highly musical result it delivers throughout, we can flatteringly call DGM the ‘Italian Symphony X’.
But one thing needs pointing out! “Endless” is a different beast from its predecessor “Life”. On the new album the band pays more generous tribute to the look and feel of old-school progressive rock, without giving up a single shred of their abrasive metal destructiveness. As you already know, in the seventies the Italians shone with a distinctive branch of progressive rock, defined by bands like Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM), Le Orme, etc … So they’ve always been not only exceptionally receptive to the genre labeled ‘progressive’, but also generally fond of it all along! Flute, strings, even saxophone and classical piano have ‘sneaked’ into the arrangements of the new album, while the passages are richly draped in a cloak of Hammond sound. In that sense, “Endless” also brings a welcome shake-up to the band’s discography. Along the way the band hasn’t sacrificed one bit of its artistic identity, but has ‘internalized’ all the novelties brilliantly and fitted them into its musical dossier. If you haven’t figured it out by then, the closing … Of Endless Echoes will confirm it for good.
The album “Endless” unfolds very dynamically. It’s vividly varied in its ideas, and as a result the moods shift just as much across its running time! That includes the wings of the excellent ballad Solitude, which recalls the influence of Symphony X, where the band doesn’t lose a drop of the convincing, artistically creative dynamite that makes the newest release “Endless” so thrilling. With it, DGM remain one of the best progressive metal bands of the classic school. Right in the bullseye! A hot spot of the progressive metal genre on a global scale! The new album is fresh proof of the band’s exceptional polish. A work of great experience, the kind that comes with mileage. And it’s been a long, winding road for the band. The time has come for the harvest and for picking plentiful fruit. “Endless” is a new one among them, and by the look of it, it will stay that way in the future too. The new album is thus another masterpiece in the colorful catalog of this esteemed quintet, one that won’t be leaving your music players anytime soon!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Promises
2. The Great Unknown
3. The Wake
4. Solitude
5. From Ashes
6. Final Call
7. Blank Pages
8. …Of Endless Echoes
Lineup:
Simone Mularoni – guitar, keyboards
Marco Basile – vocals
Emanuele Casali – keyboards, flute
Andrea Arcangeli – bass guitar
Fabio Costantino – drums
