Short Reviews [Leon Alvarado - 2022 - "Charging The Electric Dream"]

The album cover shows two quite different images of Leon, and the reason for this is that in some ways this is a compilation in that it looks back over the last twenty years at pieces he had written and never found room for them on a release. A huge flood in 2017 destroyed the drives on which some of the pieces were kept, which meant a total recreation or re-recording while others could be utilised exactly as they were, even down to the mixing. It is somewhat difficult to realise this is from such a long period of time as they certainly all work together and the result is an album which I enjoyed far more than his last release, 2016’s ‘The Future Left Behind’. In some ways that was somewhat over ambitious, while this electronic progressive album knows exactly what it is about, with even the dreaded electronic drum machines making perfect sense in this context. Most of his influences are solidly from the Seventies and then brought into the Eighties, with Tangerine Dream in particular having a huge part to play although Kraftwerk also come through in some places, and there is a slight hint of Vangelis here and there as well. It is an album which has been delicately composed and delivered, so much so that even someone like myself who does not play a lot of this style of music for pleasure can get a great deal from it. There is a great deal of space within this, Leon has deliberately not overplayed, with the arrangements being carefully crafted so they take the listener on a journey of discovery. The keyboards utilised are incredibly familiar to progheads, a combination of real and emulated famous keyboards, primarily a MiniMoog, a Roland Jupiter 8, a Korg M1, the ARP 2600 as well as the software version of the Roland TR-808. Dynamic and driving, with real force and presence at times, gentler at others, this is a wonderful piece of work.