Placid as the autumn rain, so it comes to our ears this album of mysterious The Aurora Project. Unveiled mystery after a short investigation: the project we’re talking about hides a young very promising dutch band, able to cleverly move across the wide plains that divide the hardest prog metal from the more atmospheric prog rock. What to expect anyway from a sixsome of guys grown up with bread and Pink Floyd? Naturally their background is also crowded by other bands, truly compatible and similar like Porcupine Tree, Anatema or Marillion, but it’s also true that it’s the inventors of psychedelic rock the reading key to start from to understand the offered sounds. “Unspoken Words” is an ambitious album both musically, for the articulated scores that characterize it, and lyrically, being it a concept album that, to quote the author listener, (the guitarist Marc Vooys), develops around a middle core ("I feel, so I exist”) which is not too different from the Cartesian “Cogito Ergo Sum”. A very universal theme, as well as universal wants to be the meaning of their music: intense but not oppressive guitar evolutions, solemn intriguing harmonic developments, penetrating never invading melodic lines, all timeless ingredients that have been forged in the seventies but which continue attracting, year by year, new generations of listeners. “They’re young and will improve”; so we use saying in such cases, even if it’s hard to understand what direction The Aurora Project must go to perfect an offer which already is untouchable.

Dario Adile