Kudos to the people over at Clone and Viewlexx for bringing ’80s Italo vocalist Fred Ventura out of retirement. He re-appeared last year on a new version of Alden Tyrell’s “Love Explosion”, and then recorded a bunch of his old hits live with Tyrell and I-F for a limited edition 12″ on Viewlexx. Like those releases, “Hold Me”, his latest single with Jupiter Black, is not going to raise any eyebrows outside the italo community, but it’s a quality synth-pop number, not too different from your average mid-to-late ’80s italo record. Needless to say, if you found stuff like Ryan Paris, P. Lion, Ken Laszlo, and Eddy Huntington to be pure parmesan, you probably won’t be into this. And even if there’s an instrumental version included, it’s not really tracky enough to have the kind of hipster cache DJs want from their italo these days. Still, this is an authentic and enjoyable sounding throwback, hopefully bound for a mixtape somewhere.

Clone / CLONE# 49
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[Michael F. Gill]