Very Interesting 2021

Wendy Dio, who has served as the curator of Dio's musical legacy and everything that relates to her late husband's career (including the Ronnie James Dio hologram tour), says: "I am very excited to be working with BMG, a label that still has a passion for rock music. They will be making the complete DIO catalog available again with some interesting surprises."

Since their return to the business in 2010 with "Melapesante", the Italians of Syndone have not stopped producing albums, each one more interesting than the other. So it's with an undisguised pleasure that we are given to discover their work entitled "Kama Sutra".
If the title of this new album suggests that Syndone will deliver this time precious advice on the different ways to reach sexual pleasure, the subject is deeper than it seems, as Riccardo Ruggieri reveals: "For Syndone, (Kama Sutra) becomes a pretext to evoke the love between two people, the reality of today's prostitutes, the provocation, the images, the symbols, the role-playing and the people…

There are two ways to look at keyboardist Roger Powell's debut album, Cosmic Furnace. It is either a visionary work as one of the first rock albums recorded entirely on synthesizer, or it's a prog rock artifact for that very reason. The facts tend support the former – it is based on the ARP synthesizer, which was uncommon for 1973 – but the music itself tends to support the latter, since it's a bunch of spacy, vaguely spooky and mystical art-rock that functions primarily as atmosphere, not as structured compositions. Each of the six cuts establishes its mood immediately and then meanders for upward of eight minutes, never really going anywhere, but treading that same patch of ground rather effectively. In other words, it's not a lost classic – not even for devoted fans of Powell's later group Utopia – but for fans of synths and '70s art-rock, it's a reasonably interesting footnote to electronic rock history.