Le Orme

In 1973 Le Orme released "Felona e Sorona", which has remained their most celebrated album over time, complete with an English-language version overseen by Peter Hammill. Yet if you look closely at the history of Italian music, you'll notice that the Veneto band had already charted that course two years earlier, with "Collage".

The Italian scene is one of the movements most cherished by nerds of progressive rock, who regard its cornerstones as being on a par with the English ones.

In 1970 Italy still hadn't caught up with the rest of the rock world, and the bands from the beat scene still had plenty of room to operate, even though the initial enthusiasm was fading. Most of those musicians had by then felt the need to break free from choruses built on sing-along refrains, and several of them travelled to England, coming back inspired and reinvigorated after experiencing firsthand the reality of King Crimson, Jethro Tull and the like.

1971 thus became year zero for Italian prog, and most agree in pinpointing "Collage", released that September, as the detonator.

By the end of that year it would be followed by "L'uomo" by Osanna, veering towards hard-rock jamming, "Terra in bocca" by Giganti, with vocal harmonies reminiscent of the Sixties, and "Dolce acqua" by Delirium, folk-pop with the odd jazzy digression — if we want to put it a bit crudely, a simplification of Traffic and Jethro Tull.

"Collage"'s primacy, however, isn't down to the couple of months separating it from those other releases, since that's far too short a span to think of any direct influence from Le Orme. Those bands would have moved towards progressive rock regardless.

The real difference lay in the content. "Collage", in fact, wasn't merely moving towards progressive rock — it was already fully immersed in it, whereas the others couldn't quite break free from the past or still showed some ill-fitting elements.

The quality of the compositions was clearly on another level. Le Orme were effectively the first Italians to make this approach to songwriting perfectly memorable, whereas Osanna's tracks were held back by their fondness for jamming and Giganti's collages came across as somewhat incoherent, structurally speaking.

Le Orme's music shifted unexpectedly, followed oddball trajectories, slipped in ambush solos, yet let everything flow with extreme naturalness, almost as if those acrobatics were typical moves within a pop song. They never gave the impression of feeling their way forward blindly, whereas their peers would only find that balance some time later.

This goes a long way toward explaining the audience's embrace, which was immediate. Just weeks after release, "Collage" was sitting at number 3 on the charts, and that was only the beginning (the following year "Uomo di pezza" would hold the number 1 spot for six weeks).

The band had actually already released an LP back in 1969, "Ad Gloriam", complete with all the naive trappings of Italian beat. Having lost guitarist Nino Smeraldi along the way, the three survivors decided to carry on without replacing him, taking their cue from the British bands who at the time were making a success of the formula without a fixed guitarist — namely Quatermass and the projects of Keith Emerson (first Nice, then ELP).

Tony Pagliuca (keyboards), Michi Dei Rossi (drums) and Aldo Tagliapietra (vocals, bass and, when needed, guitar) were thus signed by Philips, even though during their beat years they hadn't achieved any particular commercial success. A decisive factor was likely the backing of Gian Piero Reverberi, who would go on to produce all their albums through 1975.

Announced by a splendid cover depicting the trio painted white inside a cemetery, the LP opens with the title track.

Although the opening recalls "Post War, Saturday Echo" by Quatermass, the most evident influence is that of ELP, with Pagliuca's Hammond organ launching into an exhilarating charge halfway between rock and baroque music.

The band's own personality still finds room to emerge, translating into a daring arrangement, with the piano hammering in, a harpsichord interlude (actually a Clavinet) echoing Domenico Scarlatti, and a triumphant closing horn section courtesy of Reverberi. The result is a track more imitative than what Emerson usually produced — it seems to want to transport rock back into the eighteenth century rather than bring the old into the present through rock.

"Era inverno" is a melancholy march driven by acoustic guitar, notable for its unusual structure (verse, instrumental refrain, verse, instrumental refrain, bridge, instrumental digression, verse with ending) and for its sparing use of bass, which is absent for much of the track except for a couple of moments where it shapes the melody. This absence of bass in guitar-led passages would recur on later albums too, giving such moments a stark, immediately recognizable dynamism.

Tagliapietra's voice, filtered through a Leslie effect, tells the story of love for a prostitute, and stands out for its diaphanous falsetto — ultimately the band's true trademark.

Painted in with a splendid cascade of piano, played by Reverberi since Pagliuca was still finding his feet on acoustic instruments, "Cemento armato" is broken up by an amphetamine-fuelled jam, dominated by the Hammond and the tight drive of the drums. "Cemento armato, la grande città, senti la vita che se ne va", Tagliapietra thunders, the first of a long series of lyrics so cheerful that, read without knowing their origin, one might mistake them for the work of some post-punk existentialist.

Side two of the record opens with the album's most famous track, "Sguardo verso il cielo", which at the time was played endlessly on Italy's national radio station Primo Programma. It's a distillation of everything Le Orme do best, a perfect calling card for anyone unfamiliar with the band.

Tagliapietra writhes in pain ("La forza di sorridere, la forza di lottare, la colpa d'esser vivo e non poter cambiare, come un ramo secco abbandonato, che cerca inutilmente di fiorire"), but finds refuge in a pastel-toned mysticism ("Uno sguardo verso il cielo dove il sole è meraviglia, dove nulla si fa mondo, dove brilla la tua luce"), which at the time went down poorly with left-wing militants.

The Hammond takes on at least three different tones, lending great variety of colour, while the ethereal melody unfolds over a series of memorable riffs and syncopated drumming, stops and restarts, electric surges and acoustic interludes, spilling into a dreamlike finale marked by the hiss of the waveform generator (Moog and Mellotron would only join the line-up from the following album onward).

During one of the most intense passages, the rhythm takes on an obsessive drive, just a step away from the motorik beat of German rock of that era.

The uncompromising experiments of their German cousins are in some way echoed too in "Evasione totale", with a long freeform interlude in which the organ and generator plunge into echoes and distortion. There's still room for more measured moments, though, like the obsessive bass line that opens and closes the track, or the keyboard flourishes that vaguely recall Ravel's "Boléro".

"Immagini" is a melancholy pop sketch, three minutes of keyboards and voice, with Dei Rossi's drums absent.

Less reassuring is the closing “Morte di un fiore,” built on acoustic arpeggios before swelling into a crescendo of electric guitars, horns and angelic choirs. Like the opening, the album's final words speak of a prostitute, though this time the epilogue reads like a crime report: “Ti sei fatta ritrovare nel mezzo di un prato, dentro ai tuoi logori blue jeans. They said you looked like you were sleeping, clutching your black hat.”

It's not out of the question that this penchant for social themes, never paired with an overt political stance, helped gradually dim the cult surrounding Le Orme, at least in Italy. It's certainly no coincidence that today Area outstrip them not only in critical esteem but perhaps even in fame. Considering that at the time Le Orme were outsold on the Italian LP market only by Pooh, while Area were known solely in the most hardcore circles, that's a rather telling fact.

Which, in any case, shouldn't matter to anyone primarily interested in the music itself, viewed as an artistic expression delicately balanced between melody, experimentation, connection to one's own reality, and at the same time a broadening of horizons. All focal points in Le Orme's stellar body of work.

Granted, one might have wished for a better epilogue for Pagliuca, given that he ended up scoring an album of Jorge Bergoglio's prayers. Tagliapietra, on the other hand, carries on his solo projects with enviable consistency (as he told OndaRock during an episode of Blah Blah Blah), moving between old-school prog, intimate ballads and a spirituality tinged with Hinduism.

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08/05/2016