Killing Touch - One Of A Kind

I love this album and I love Luppi's voice. This guy needs more attention.

The Touch is awesome. Good album.

This is a really nice album with Michele Luppi at the helm. It's basically a continuation of his time in Vision Divine and reminds me a lot of The Perfect Machine record, highest quality Italian power metal with hints of prog here and there. The record starts of excellent with the up-tempo numbers The Touch and Wheel of Fortune (with the cool Black Ice intro inbetween). Then the heavy and maybe best song on the album follows (Mimicking Death), then the middle part of the album comes where it varies a bit in quality. The Danger Zone is a bit too by the numbers (still good), the title track is quite repetetive and Still Walking is a way too long piano instrumental that doesn't do much except showing off Luppis skills on the piano. Tommy's Cane sandwhiched inbetween is luckily there to put the songwriting on top. The ending four songs are not as fast as the opening songs but wraps up the album in a real nice way (the Black Ice melodies are reused in Justify).

The album is a concept album based on the Stephen King book The Dead Zone and usually I love concepts but here it's a bit too loose and it doesn't elevate the album in any way. If they would have choosed a better concept and skipped the instrumental song and the title track this could have been a pretty much flawless album. I still gonna give it a 9 as I love most part of this album.

There were a second album in the works but sadly it was laid on ice and then the band split. With Luppi in Whitesnake now a days I don't think we will see any kind of these albums from him in a while if ever.