Soul Secret from Italy is a nice melting pot of progressive rock and metal, 'Flowing Portraits' is their debut album, recorded in Naples, Italy in 2007 and mastered by Karl Groom (Threshold).

'Flowing Portraits' runs for almost an hour and offers six well played, orchestrated and constructed songs and show a band that know which direction they want to take their music on a very consistent basis. The album does however suffer greatly from a mediocre production, very uneven and surprisingly poor quality.

The result is that guest vocalist Mark Basile's vocals come across very thin and almost scream'ish, which spoils the otherwise interesting album quite some. Technically they are very sound, and the six songs do all have some potential...

A decent start for this young Italian band, but nothing special or extraordinary to report. This one will only pass as an acceptable beginning...