JOE DENINZON & STRATOSPHEERIUS – Impostor!

7D Media 2024

JOE DENINZON & STRATOSPHEERIUS –
Impostor!

Six years in the making, intrepid sonic experimenters’ album number five brings their studio trip to the discovery of melodic dominance in their ensemble’s mindset.

It seemed easy to assume that Joe Deninzon’s joining KANSAS – and doing a hell of a job onstage with them – would signal a hiatus for STRATOSPHEERIUS, but, if anything, such a turn of events only sped up the work on the opus this collective have been toiling for for quite a long time. When the wondrously fractured and arrestingly intense anthem called “Impostor!” arrived in 2019, Deninzon might not yet concocted the album’s concept, which would boil down to cracking the charade of life; only once the record’s tracks started trickling into the ensemble’s live repertoire, as their concert document "Behind The Curtain" suggested, the overall image emerged. However, no amount of intellectual and existential snapshots Joe’s music offers can distract the listener from the beauty of the group’s tunes and arrangements.

They don’t really veer away from what’s perceived as progressive rock palette in sonic terms, yet the nine pieces on display see Deninzon’s band place melodic swirl into cerebral cortex to deliver the most impressively finessed cycle of their two-decade run, Joe’s bow blurring the border between classical violin and folk fiddle to populate the platter’s titular number with the ghosts of Vivaldi and Swarbrick and then let heavy riffs drive on. All of this will not happen before, fleshed out by Bill Hubauer’s ivories and bolstered by Michelangelo Quirinale’s six strings, “Outrage Olympics” attacks cancel culture with graceful, almost blissful harmonies and applies bossa nova sensuality to the vast expanse tentatively outlined at the beginning by the burst of “Voodoo Vortex Part II” whose fully fledged, and also wordless, first chapter occupies a cosmic space further on up the road. But while Deninzon and Randy McStine share vocals on the urgency-loaded “Cognitive Dissonance” that marries deeply felt personal tragedy to raucous rocking, “Storm Surge” finds Michael Sadler’s voice, Rachel Flowers’ piano and flute and Fernando Perdomo’s guitars, especially his acoustic lace, helping Joe unfold majestic madrigal into a power ballad of highest caliber.

That’s why the frantic, demonically possessed and instrumentally repossessed, cover of “Frame By Frame” is required here: to reset emotional frontiers. It also cleanses the palate for “Tripping The Merry-Go-Round” which will attempt a brief foray into chamber romanticism, and for the intimately epic, and ultimately triumphant, “Chasing The Dragon” to stage a vigorous, if sometimes reserved, multipartite stroll towards the world of sweet reveries, where Paul Ranieri’s bass passages are tangible and Deninzon’s minuets are magical, with Chloe Lowery widening the little opera’s lyrical perspective. Still, the platter’s entire panorama and scope are much, much wider – broad enough to render the impostor syndrome irrelevant, because these pieces are all about belonging.

*****

December 10, 2024