Progressive Rock
18 May 2026
“Prince of One Day” opens the record at six minutes and nine seconds, and anyone who knows the Italian catalogue of the seventies will place it before the first line is sung: it’s “Principe di un Giorno”, the piece that opened Celeste’s debut album on Grog Records in 1976, at all but the same length. The seven tracks here are the seven from that record, in the same order, and not one of the running times has moved by more than fifteen seconds.
What’s new is the voice. Ciro Perrino, a founding member, has built this international version on top of the 1976 beds (which carry co-founders Giorgio Battaglia, Leonardo Lagorio and Mariano Schiavolini) and has Celtic harpist and singer Siobhán Owen sing them in English, recorded in Adelaide. On “Ancient Fables”, which runs eight minutes fifteen, a few seconds under “Favole antiche”, her voice rides a weave of Mellotron-coloured keyboards and flute, and the dynamic range is left alone: the quiet passages stay quiet. “The Merchant” closes in one minute and seven seconds, just as “L’imbroglio” closed the original in a little over a minute, and “Far White Halo” (3:42) is the new title for “La danza del fato”: those two are new titles rather than translations of the old ones.
With the running times untouched and the original beds underneath, what arrives is the 1976 album sung again. The four minutes of “Eftus” and the eight of “Games in the Night” stand up on their own terms. What is nowhere to be found is a reason to swap the 1976 record for this one. Fifty years of distance ought to have yielded more than a change of language.
Thirty-six and a half minutes. Perrino put it on Bandcamp on 20 March, for the original’s fiftieth anniversary, and it reached the platforms on 18 May.
Rating: 7/10
Text by Guillem Cardós