Progressive Rock
altipiani · 12 June 2026
“Kinder egg surprise” is the track on “Drops of Sunshine in the City of Spectres” where a melody you can follow finally turns up, and it gets there by an improbable route: eighties structures, approachable math rock and a stretch of danceable techno-funk, with El Mistico on drums. Jan Buddenberg, who reviewed it for DPRP and admits that the rest of the EP speaks to him in riddles, singles that one out. The other four tracks concede nothing of the sort.
Fiesta Alba are Italian, they wear luchador masks and they sign under noms de guerre: Octagon composes and plays the guitars, Dos Caras produces and handles the synthesisers, Fishman plays bass, Sangre Azteca is the live guitarist and Paltamayo plays a processed violin. This is their third release and their second EP, after the 2025 album “Pyrotechnic Babel”. It is twenty-three minutes put out on 12 June by altipiani, and what they do here they were already doing there: African polyrhythms, minimalist electronics, dub, new wave and sampled radical thinkers. The guests each sing one track: Diego Pandiscia provides voice and lyrics on “Inch by inch”, Tiziana Lo Conte sings on “Uncontacted” and Alessandra Plini on “The city of spectres I”.
The EP unfolds in a spiral. It opens with “The city of spectres II”, which sounds as though it were running backwards, with locked polyrhythms and tense guitar motifs; “Inch by inch” adds sampled guitars and spoken word and ends on a coda of strings; “Uncontacted” travels through loops and microtonality and leaves on dissonant guitars that recall King Crimson; “The city of spectres I” heads off entirely into dub and wordless voices. The two tracks named after the city are numbered the opposite way round from the order they appear in, II first and I next to last, and that is the only gesture towards order the record allows itself.
In the notes that come with the EP, the band explain that they have broken a long-standing taboo and used a neural voice for the first time, arguing that technology should be a tool and not an end. On an EP presented as a portrait of resistance and an act of solidarity with the marginalised (the masks, they say, stand for power reclaimed by the people who are left out of the picture), one of the voices belonging to no person at all is a contradiction the group might have sat with a little longer. And there is a fact the record does not give: which track it is on. The DPRP review goes track by track, credits the three guest singers and does not mention it, and we cannot say either. What can be said is that the EP is a great deal better than its own secrecy lets you see.
Rating: 7.7/10
Text by Guillem Cardós