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With the new second album Dreaming The Strife For Love, Italy's Bedsore have jumped headfirst into the progressive warmth and obscure atmospheres of the 1970s. Inspired by the mysterious renaissance-era book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the album musically weaves the concepts of love as a battlefield, where desire and devotion are tested through trials and spiritual awakenings, with visions of pagan temples, mystical gardens, and arcane symbols.

An aspirational and operatic aura envelops Dreaming The Strife For Love, from the longer compositions and spacious production to the extravagant and diverse instrumentation that includes 12-string guitar, copious use of synthesizers, mellotron and organs, fretless bass, percussion and horns; the dynamic range of the album embracing the most crucial elements of prog rock's lofty imagination.

Though the progressive side of Bedsore has been given much more room to stretch out, the death metal foundations remain present in the DNA. Vocally throughout the album the agonized screams of Jacopo Gianmaria Pepe endure, and the manic dark death and blackened metal riffs now segue and merge into the whole more adeptly than ever before. This results in an album that, rather than feeling like two separate albums in one, embraces a coherence for both forms, to create a surreal, reality-bending immersion wholly their own.

Lush, symphonic, ambitious and romantic in scope, Bedsore's Dreaming The Strife For Love is 2024's most surprising fusion of 70s progressive and dark death metal, old and new production elements, the passionate and the horrific. Like so many of their Italian brethren from Goblin and Devil Doll, to Death SS and Black Hole, Bedsore both embrace tradition and blow it up simultaneously.