SAEKO – Back To Life

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6.5

• Bands:
  SAEKO
• Duration: 00:24:34
• Available from: 07/22/2026

This “Back to Life” is the new EP from the energetic Japanese singer Saeko Kitamae. An extremely programmatic title, and on a dual level: on the one hand it represents the return to the stage after a particularly difficult period, during which the musician had to face major surgical interventions following an injury that could have left her disabled; on the other hand it is also a tribute to his second album, “Life”, explicitly referred to in the title. Deeply personal motivations and feelings that inevitably lead to a very autobiographical work, not so much in the self-referential sense of the term but rather in that of a record capable of looking at its own artistic and human history.

Of the five songs included, only one is truly new: the telluric “Glorious Day”, an episode that offers a decidedly classic power metal and indebted to the usual tutelary deities – Gamma Ray and Helloween above all – but still capable of its own identity thanks to a pleasant melodic bridge supported by the arpeggio of the talented Guido Benedetti, a guitarist who many will also know for his work in Trick Or Treat. Even without reinventing the genre, the piece convinces with its compositional solidity and performance quality: the solos are compelling, while the rhythm section, entrusted to Michael Ehré (The Unity) and Alessandro Sala (Rhapsody Of Fire), accompanies everything with precision and a greater variety than one might expect.

The rest of the EP instead offers three completely rearranged songs — or, as Saeko herself rightly writes in the tracklist, 'reimagined' — and just one track simply remastered. The former all draw from the debut “Above Heaven, Below Heaven”, while the remastered song comes from the latest album, “Holy Are We Alone”. And it is precisely in the three rereadings that the album finds much of its interest.
In fact, it is not a simple sonic update – understandable, considering that the debut dates back to 2004 – but a true reinterpretation of the pieces, enriched by Benedetti's neoclassical taste and a rhythm section that is decidedly more imaginative, dynamic and refined than the original versions.
Of course, it is still an EP, with a limited duration and with just a few minutes of truly unreleased material: yet an operation like this still deserves to be welcomed.
In the rereading of the old songs we can in fact perceive the strong desire to get back into the game after a period that we can only imagine how difficult it was, while “Glorious Day” demonstrates that the musician's pen – even within the now well codified confines of Teutonic power metal – still retains a fair amount of inspiration.

We can therefore listen to this little work without too many expectations, but with sincere pleasure, above all because it tells the story of the return of an artist who was able to react to a very complicated moment with determination and passion. In the end, metal also lives on stories like this.