Alan Elettronico
Electric Mind

An album inspired by the '80s is not, in itself, a big novelty. In fact, put that way, it can only evoke the saccharine mannerism of contemporary indie-pop raiding Umberto Tozzi's arrangements to sing about love migraines, but not all nostalgia is harmful. Alan Elettronico, who from his name wants to leave no doubt about belonging to another era, presents himself on the music market with an album that the label, Projekt Records, categorizes as synthwave and, hear this, "space disco." Now, space disco was a particular branch of disco, very short-lived, between 1977 and 1980, but it left a certain impact on the collective imagination: people like the Rockets, the Italian-French aliens painted in silver, the alternative embraces of Dee Dee Jackson involved with an Automatic Lover and a Meteor Man, in short, all that glamorous space in lycra and glitter that made you dance with sounds halfway between acoustic and electronic, which rarely reappeared on the music scene. An exception was the French house of the end of the millennium, which looked with satisfied interest at that era, which Elettronico undoubtedly studied with what I would call a maniacal attention. He himself cites the sources for each track of this 8-track album in the press release, which, let's say immediately, blends perfectly among the vinyl records of the era: Giorgio Moroder, Lipps Inc., the La Bionda brothers. Indeed, "I wanna be your lover" by the latter cannot help but come to mind listening to "Space Beyond," or the vocoder of "Funky Town" while listening to the robotic voices of "What Am I?" and "VideoGirl." And inevitably, you dance: not frenetic rhythms, you travel comfortably between 110 and 120 bpm, but the 4/4 with driving bass and old-school synths immediately pull a head bobbing from you from the first intro. An energetic album, shamelessly retro, from someone who truly loves what they're doing, and it shows.