Progressive Rock
Maracash Records · May 2026
VIII Strada formed in Milan in 1996 and put out a first four-track EP in 1998. “Città Totale” is their third album and it arrives as a double, fourteen tracks and an hour and three quarters of music, on Maracash Records. On 22 May they presented it at the Legend Club in Milan, opening for Banco del Mutuo Soccorso.
The way the running order is divided says what the record is for: five live tracks, two unreleased studio pieces (“Città Totale” and “Quale primavera”) and the complete remastered reissue of “La leggenda della grande porta”, their December 2008 debut. Between that album and this one there was only “Babylon”, from 2015. Of new music there are twelve minutes out of a hundred and five.
The quartet — Tito Vizzuso on vocals, Davide Zigliani on guitar, Sergio Merlino on bass and Sigfrido Percich on drums — sings in Italian and works inside the progressive rock tradition of its own country, with a weight of guitar that puts the band closer to Pain of Salvation than to anyone from the seventies. The live section includes a reading of Le Orme’s “Canzone d’Amore”, the 1976 single that reached number two in the Italian charts, and it is the only song on the record that is not theirs.
The two new pieces run five and a half minutes and six minutes twenty, short lengths for the ground they cover, and they sit between the live material and the reissue: the double works as a career summary rather than as a studio album. VIII Strada have shared stages with Arena, Osanna, Biglietto per l’Inferno, Tony Levin and Van der Graaf Generator’s David Jackson, and spent a year and a half playing with Area’s Patrizio Fariselli.
They are presenting it on three dates this October: the 16th in Vercelli, the 17th in Bellinzona (Switzerland) and the 30th in San Giovanni Lupatoto, with Alphataurus and VII Vitium.
Rating: 6.8/10
Text by Guillem Cardós