FERRIGNO-LEAL-KUPRIJ - Promised Land

8 songs
50:28 minutes
***** **
Lion

Bandpage

A word of caution before I start this review: Promised Land is a clash of the egos type of album, where not one musical technician is showing off his skills, but three of them. So if you hate guitar virtuoso albums, you will reject this one with all the power in your heart.

But, there are also the people who revel in succeeding sequences of notes too fast for normal people to understand. What he have here is keyboard mastermind Vitalij Kuprij with the two guitar players Javier Leal and Marco Ferrigno. Kuprij being from the Ukraine, Leal from Mexico and Ferrigno of Italian ancestry, you get already 3 people with totally different backgrounds. Where Kuprij is a classically trained musician who played chamber music all over the world (and even in Luxembourg), Leal and Ferrigno are more traditional guitar heroes, who master both the melodic stuff to the ultrafast shredding school. At times, the different influences sound very fusionlike, so that the elements of hard rock, classical music and jazz guarantee that there is a wide variety of sounds on this album.

As this is an instrumental album (they couldn't probably have a fourth ego in the project), you tend to be overwhelmed by solos, be it guitar or keyboards, and the actual song never really sticks in your mind. Still, this is one of the more interesting instrumental albums, though like so often it's probably only interesting for people with a higher understanding of the theory behind the music. People who like their progressive metal more accessible can still try Kuprij's band Artension.