Paolo Baltaro - 2018 - Live Pillheads

(65:36, Banksville Records)

Track list:
1. Sunny Days 3:24
2. You’ll Never Die On Me 3:38
3. Angel Of March 12:15
4. Swimmer In The Sand 5:12
5. I Don’t Mind 5:42
6. Brightest Moon 6:31
7. Bike 5:52
8. Italian Guns 3:37
9. Cole Porter And Frankz’s Birthday Party 8:51
10. Nowhere Street – Part II 10:30

Line-up:
Paolo Baltaro – vocals, guitars
Simone Morandotti – keyboards
Daniele Mignone – bass
Andrea Beccaro – drums
Andrea Orru’ – guitar


Prolusion.
Paolo Baltaro is an Italian musician, composer and producer, the founder of the Banksville Records label. As a musician, he is primarily known as a member of the neo-prog band Arcansiel, which was active since the late 1980s to the middle of the 1990s, and Società Anonima Decostruzionismi Organici (S.A.D.O for short), an avant-jazz project, to which Paolo moved after Arcansiel. Among Banksville Records’ clients are Baltaro’s two abovementioned bands, as well as many other artists. In 2017, the musician founded a band named The Pillheads, which, as of January 2024, has released nine albums. Live Pillheads is their first recorded work – a live concert at the Officine Sonore, Vercelli (Italy) on 2nd February 2018.

Analysis.
What perhaps stylistically unites all the songs on the album is a heavy element with enough dynamism, the first part of it more characterised by classical heavy prog, and the second half is largely bluesy hard rock. In other ways, this is quite an eclectic (not in a bad sense of the word) and diverse stuff, with an admixture of quite a range of styles, which, perhaps, is the result of Baltaro’s past experience of participating in stylistically diverse projects. The music frequently alludes to early prog years. The musicianship and music quality is high-level throughout.

The first two tracks, Sunny Days and You’ll Never Die On Me, are short and quite straightforward “classical” heavy songs, quite dynamic and interesting though, the latter also “complicated” with changes between odd and regular beats.      
 
Angel Of March is a wonderful 12-minute multi-structured song. It begins similarly – the first three plus minutes are classical melodic heavy prog with a lot of piano and synthetic keyboards, which suddenly drops into a slow meditative early Porcupine Tree-like part. This continues to develop glistening with numerous beautiful passages, then returning to the opening theme and ending with a magic Floydish guitar solo. Delightful!

 While Swimmer In The Sand is a nice song with beautiful harmonies, continuing the line of the previous ones, the next track, I Don’t Mind, is already quite traditional hard blues rock. Brightest Moon is characterised by a complex jazzy piano opening, while the rest of the composition is quite plain and has a verse-and-chorus structure.

These are followed by a version of Syd Barret’s Bike from the first Pink Floyd album, which unexpectedly ends with a jazzy solo of pianos and electric guitars. Italian Guns is another bluesy simple-structured song, while on Cole Porter And Frankz’s Birthday Party the band seems to wish to demonstrate in eight minutes all styles and instruments they master. Though somewhat eclectic, with numerous and abrupt tempo changes, it is quite interesting, well-performed and filled with humour. Nowhere Street – Part II is another song that features diversity of styles and many solos, but, contrary to the timing specified, it actually is about 7 minutes long, after which comes one minute of cheers from the audience, and then more than two minutes of just silence until the end of the track.

Conclusion.
The album has multiple strong and weak points, the former definitely overweighing. I’d probably highlight Angel of March and Cole Porter… as very outstanding works. The rest is more or less average in terms of ideas, but almost every song is interesting in its own way. There is some eclecticism of style, and some songs are overloaded with impros. The material is not extraordinary, yet it sounds quite original; moreover, the musicians demonstrate impeccable skills throughout and sound humour. Enjoy!

Shamil “Proguessor” Gareev, January 2024

Links:
http://www.paolobaltaro.com/
https://www.banksvillerecords.com/