RanestRane: Crazy ideas

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A band that proably have gone under radar for many progheads is Italian Ranestrane? It’s too bad for the band offer a lot of exciting music. Now the 5th album A Space Odyssey Final Part – Starchild by, and their 3rd and last in their A Space Odyssey-trilogy of . The new record features guest’s musicians Steve Hogarth and Steve Rothery, both from Marillion.

RanestRane gets high marks for the entire A Space Odyssey trilogy, and for this part in the trilogy. They took an album concept that is unbelievably hard to pull off, and did it, with songs bursting with melody and memorable moments. The band are all outstanding players in their own right. Daniele Pomo is a much better lead vocalist than most drummer/vocalists one tends to hear, but it’s a shame he’s stuck behind the kit when they play live. It’s tempting to give the album’s originality top scores, because what a crazy idea this was and how many years it took to pull it off successfully.

And the production value is quite good. It’s not the best-sounding album you’ll ever hear, but crank it up on a solid sound system, and you’ll be quite pleased. There are space-age arpeggio keyboards aplenty, heavy driving rock sessions evoking the panic of certain moments in the film, and quiet, somber acoustic guitar moments which make the listener ponder how alone we are, or are we, in infinite space. All the while, we are led along on the journey by Daniele Pomo‘s soulful and heartfelt vocals, and despite things being lost in translation, at least Italian is a beautiful language, and sung with great beauty. The acoustic vocal duet in Stargate, for example, being one of the most poignant moments of the trilogy.

RanestRane is an Italian prog band from Rome that was formed in 1996. The aim of the musicians involved in this project was to compose and perform a rock-opera, so they chose a famous Werner Herzog’s film, Nosferatu The Vampyre, and commented it with music and original lyrics. They started their live activity in 2000 and conceived their shows as a cineconcerto, with the images of the Herzog’s film flowing in the background. In 2006 they released their rock-opera on a self-produced studio album, a double CD called Nosferatu il Vampiro.

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