Monnalisa - In Principio (2017)

The debut album from this Italian band.

The band is a quartet with a lineup of guitars, bass, keyboards, drums and Italian vocals.

New bands from Italy is as welcome as water in the Sahara desert. Well, that is my opinion.

MonnaLisa is not entirely conforming to the Italian symphonic prog (RPI) formula. Their music is too much metal and too hard for that.

.....Although the album has been released on an Italian heavy metal record label (Andromeda Relix), I am not so sure if MonnaLisa is playing progressive metal at all.

It is not always easy to get the difference between symphonic hard rock and progressive metal. OK, parts of In Principio is progressive metal. But not all of it and this is therefore not a progressive metal album. Not entirely.

Take some RPI and fuse that with progressive metal. You will end up with this forty minutes long album.

Besides of the more harder progressiv metal and symphonic stuff, there are also some more progressive rock which will appeal to all RPI fans. Fans of modern RPI, that is.

The end result is a good album which will please both fans of RPI and progressive metal. Check out this album.

3 points