Agghiastru
Incantu

Agghiastru is a true artist! You can criticize him on everything. He is not a good singer, nor a great performer, he might not even know how to write his poetry, and the recordings of his albums don't have that professional touch that panders to the market. And he would confirm it himself. However, for fifteen years now, Agghiastru has been the most original artist I have ever heard. He is capable of being independent from everything: newspapers, reviews, the music industry, yet he is always there as a point of reference for those who are bored and looking for new vibrations in music, expressed with boundless loyalty. Incantu is an incredible album. It is the tangible testimony of an artist's work and creativity.

The Sicilian shaman groans his chant from the initial notes of L'incantu, a piano ballad close, like indeed the whole album, to the sounds of Nick Cave in recent years. It proceeds with a tribal mantra on the electric Sangu, a furious song laden with bare sounds and ancestral atmospheres. But then the mood changes in the tracklist, and La stanza arrives with a rhythm outside of the rock schemes. This is the first song sung in Italian and not Sicilian. There's everything in it: guitars, double bass, maracas, and the twilight piano supporting Agghiastru's whispered chant. Beautiful. Among my favorites is also the following Carennu, and we return to calm and hypnotic rhythms, a worthy musical commentary for the Sicilian desert of our minstrel. Rosa too, aggressively shows all its Sicilian charm. The song is about a prostitute who, for a few coins, took the virginity of a boy, but withered by her loveless life, she soon kills herself. The classical guitar arpeggio is elegant, the bass is frantic, and the crescendo is truly acidic. Another dance spin with a waltz that smells of damp, we get with Ferru & Focu, another track sung in Italian. Agghiastru's themes are well-known by now. Love, love, and always love... gone sour, though. Things that can reduce a man to a crackled, arid shell. Tintatu is a baroque composition where the bass takes center stage. There's a Rhodes piano and the 'usual' swinging Mediterranean melody. More rock-like in drum tempos is Paria, the music of a music box straining to spin its ballerina. It seems superfluous to say that the album is great all around, a bit heavy to listen to all in one go, considering it lasts almost seventy minutes, and that all the songs deserve to be explored in depth. Beautiful, for example, is Amorte, a neologism coined by the storyteller, voice and accordion, or the new version of Unia, very desert-like... and to conclude, Vitti 'na Crozza. Agghiastru digs a grave for the skull ("Vitti 'na crozza" - translated - would be "saw a skull") that couldn't find a proper burial, and in the meantime, the music becomes very dark, but there is great irony in the air, more than just 'trallalleru trallallà'. Fantastic, there are no words, especially if you have the fortune to see the show live. An extraordinary album for its intimate side, for the Sicilian melodies, the originality, and the charisma of a unique character.

Thank you Agghiastru.

Maddalena Vanausen