There are countless bands or projects that come from Rhapsody first version. Over many detours, copyright issues, disagreements, departures, splits... there have been Rhapsody Of Fire, Lucas Turilli's Rhapsody, Lucas Turilli's Dreamquest... With this Turilli/Lione's Rhapsody, here is the umpteenth formation, clone of the original band, born following Lione's invitation to Turilli to participate in concerts to celebrate Rhapsody's 20th anniversary. It is therefore not the fifth symphony that the listener will be entitled to, but at least the fifth Rhapsody.
If this evolution of the name is not easy to follow, it is also a musical progression because it must be said that in the beginning, Rhapsody did not play lace, enamelling his work with an epic base that was often suffocating to the point of disgust. Since then, Lucas Turilli tried to bring a little more subtlety to his compositions with different themes.
The genre-sensitive listener therefore naturally finds in this album this grandiloquence, certainly specific to the style but always pushed to its paroxysm with the Italian, with however more modern sounds and orientations to dust off a sleeping symphonic metal. As soon as the album opens, the samples place it in a more SF domain to which female choirs and a power that arrives very (too) quickly are added, giving the impression that this choice does not give the story time to settle down. "Phoenix Rising" is a catch-all title where classicism, electro, calm and storm intersect with few nuances, especially with a production that seems a little muffled. This modernism can be found in several places of "Zero Gravity", notably in the energetic "Fast Radio Burst" with its epic verses accentuated by a chorus that is no less so but whose architecture contains transitions that lack fluidity.
In the game of influences, it is no surprise to anyone that Lucas Turilli loves Queen, especially in the ballad "Amata Immortale" at the piano with this opera base dear to Freddy Mercury, but even more so in "I Am" with his passage of a few seconds modelled on "Bohemian Rhapsody". It must be admitted that if the whole album sometimes lacks nuances, the goal of bringing a cinematographic connotation to the project is rather successful.
If the will of the Turilli / Lione duo was to bring symphonic metal into the 21st century, it is partly a gamble won. However, the album still contains too many old gimmicks as well as a few parts drowned in a desire to do too much, lacking legibility and especially a touch of humility. Let's bet that the next album will erase these few reservations.