The Italian music scene currently seems to be exploding with Progressive and Power Metal bands, sometimes even combinations of both! LUCID DREAM is no exception, with progressive leanings and some rather mystical sounding lyrical ideas. With their second release, "The Eleventh Illusion" the band is showing off its talents for songwriting and how much they work well as a band.

The album opens up with some dramatic spoken word that is all in Italian, on the track "The Gates Of Shadows". Now, I can't actually speak Italian, but luckily my girlfriend is actually Italian, and she kindly translated this introduction to the album. To me it seems like some kind of mystical incantation kind of thing, to set the scene of the album with some kind of atmosphere, ending in the phrase "destroy Maya's veil" before we go on to the first guitar riff of the album, in the song "Evolution". This begins with a rocking main riff and continues on in this vein well, with awesome lead vocals and a nice chorus to top it off. This song has a kind of laid-back feel despite it's quite upbeat overall sound and atmosphere.

There's plenty of cool stuff on offer from this album, with dynamic songs like "Leave Me Alone", which contains some cool clean sections later on, to really calming acoustic songs like "River Drained", a song that has a kind of Jazzy feel to it that the addition of a saxophone definitely completes, making it quite a cool ballad. There are some more straightforward moments on the album too, with songs like "Back to Cosmos11" which has some awesome rock moments on it. Some more highlights include the track "The Song of the Beyond (Acoustic Reprise From The Future)", which as the title would have you believe is a nice ethereal sounding acoustic track with lots of "trippy" sound effects and some chilled out playing

The production is rather good, as you would expect from any worthwhile second album; everything is nice and clear, and the drums and vocals in particular standout as being the best produced. It is nice and loud without clipping out the mix and it's all been recorded well. As well as this, the title track "The Eleventh Illusion" is a cool track with an awesome main riff full of twists, with a well thought out rhythm section. The song moves around a lot, changing feels with lots of cool riffs, and a great lead vocal once again.

The last actual piece of music on the album is "The Pulse of Infinity", which builds a lot of atmosphere before a spoken word section ties things up for "The Way Of 7M".

Overall, this is a solid second release, and should see the band through to a bit more exposure!