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 PRIMITIVE: the long awaited new album 

  After three years of waiting, The Watch are back with their third album PRIMITIVE. It represents a clear continuation, but also a step-forward to their previous albums Ghost and Vacuum. And I'm not considering their first attempt, Twilight, which was recorded under the name of The Night Watch: a sweet memory far away from the new proposed tunes and lyrics of PRIMITIVE.

PRIMITIVE

At first listening, I have been surprised how the band have been able to outline a backward path to the origins of progressive. And with PRIMITIVE they reach the starting point. As before, they have taken a risk again: their braveness is mixed with the humbleness of a fiery attempt to make prog-music alive again. Taking stock of the origins, The Watch venture on new paths in lyrics and sound, daring us with dazzling combinations.

The lyrics touch different matters and Nature appears as the inspiring muse of many subjects. Other topics are, among the others, love and friendship, like in the song "Berlin, 1936", which was inspired by the great story of Jesse Owens and Lutz Long at the Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin. As before, unreal atmospheres and absurd characters are depicted in PRIMITIVE.

The music, in a typical '70s art rock style, is very dynamic and rich in sound. The band chose genuine vintage instruments like mellotron M400, moogs, organ, and synths (arp solina synthesizer, arp omni mk1, ecc..). This has been a move forward which brings great vintage atmospheres in a very natural and personal style of composing music. In my opinion, what puts The Watch at the top of the prog scene nowadays are the great melodies and tunes, and PRIMITIVE is not an exception.

 Simone Rossetti and Fabio Mancini talk about PRIMITIVE 


Simone Rossetti
introduces the new album 		  “ For many reasons, the new Watch album, like Ghost and Vacuum has been a tremendous effort. I started working on the compositions in 2005. Some pieces developed quite easily, while others were quite time consuming and required many changes in the harmonies and structures.

I spent more time on structures compared to the composition of single harmonies. I preferred to try many solutions before coming to a result in terms of a song structure. In my opinion, it's very important that a song should not be too redundant or boring, with “already-listened-to” melodies or solutions.

As I have always done in the past, I share my ideas with the guys by letting them listen to the music files and by explaining to them what I need in terms of moods and atmospheres for each moment.

For this album, I personally focused my work on keyboards as I did the same on our two previous albums. It happened especially for the moog and mellotron parts which were supervised by Sergio Taglioni at StudioLab. Fabio Mancini focused his efforts especially on piano and organ parts and he had the leading role during the recording of the whole keyboards.

On this album, we tried to use only original vintage keyboards: Mellotron, Minimoog, Moog prodigy, Arp Omni mk1, Yamaha cs15, Arp Solina String Synthesizer, Yamaha cp 80, electric piano, Elka Synthex…  ”



Fabio Mancini
heart-to-heart talks
   “ After listening to the demos composed by Simone, I firstly focused on organ parts. At this stage I worked intensely on the concatenation of different chords looking for the best harmonization. I was on a quest for those tensions which would have better fit into the pieces I was working on.

On the other hand, I took also in consideration that the final result should have been easy to sing along. Therefore I capitalized on the different parts of the keyboards in a dynamic way and I used drawbars intesively. I think that the final result is exceptionally good. The organ parts are "scratchy" but with the right tension. Furthermore, it is a sound that I have already proposed to the audience during live gigs and which can be listened to in the live bootleg recently released.

After the organ I was involved in the piano parts. I proposed different solutions to Simone. I chose those parts which I thought were the most compatible with the vocal lines. It was really a teamwork since we improvised, combined and changed the piano parts together. And as soon as we both thought it was the best solution, we froze the part we were working on.

We eventually considered the synth parts which were recorded last by Simone and myself. To get polyphony we overdubbed the mono synths parts. The final result has also thickened their sound. Very old ('75) polyphonic synths have also been used during the recording. I think that the overdubbing made everything even much better.  ”