Altro
Candore

"I thought we were one, only one"
(Pythagoras)

It's tough being part of a minority.

The first album of Altro is a demonstration of this; it must not have been easy for this trio from Pesaro to release such an album in 2001, in Italy. If we wanted to use the classic bipolarism, Underground-Mainstream, or Beatles-Rolling Stones, with Afterhours in place of the Rolling, where would Altro fit in their debut album?
In neither of the two categories for sure, and if someone thinks differently, they’re free to correct me.
When I think of the scene back then, as I remember it, I can't help but think that it must not have been easy for Altro to survive with their post-punk sounds and cryptic lyrics. And yet they made it, maybe because their intention wasn’t to survive in the market but just to make music they liked.

"Candore" is thus an album for early fans, or for insiders, and today it remains much the same.
Even for completists. Matteo Caldari, Gianni Pagnini, and Alessandro Baronciani, respectively on drums, bass, and guitar, in this album offer a broader spectrum of influences compared to their subsequent works. Far from the homogeneity of "Prodotto" and the crystallinity of "Aspetto," "Candore" is more distinctly punk, sung, and adolescent. It shows nothing of what will come; just take a look at the song lengths, the shortest is one minute and twenty-five. It’s a record that shows the wounds, and it summarizes a breviary of feelings from provincial teenagers: you are neither Beatles nor Rolling Stones, and in the ostentatious transgression of bands like Afterhours, you smell something fishy.
The lyrics are descriptive sketches, narration is not part of their style.
"Stay where you are, Look at what is missing between us".

The composition shows some weak points as in "Fratta": "I feel good with You, I don’t feel good with you".
Where sometimes certain lyrical solutions are a bit simplistic. Overall "Candore", what a beautiful title, is a record that shows a band still in metamorphosis, yet already oriented to certain counter-trend sounds.

"Documento Uno" seems like a dancing flashforward, I can hear it well in that scene from "The Darjeeling Limited" when Anderson mimicking Gondry of "Knives Out", outside the window lets all the characters of the film scroll by. "Pitagora" is too bombastic, it’s not their style in my opinion. "Costanza" is a song for disappointed provincial adolescents, too atypical to make a poster, and "I still think where I went wrong", sums us up. "Too Soon" is one of the best tracks with a melodic singing for once, and a nice lyric "While I hope not to find you again, Come and get me, too easy".

"Capitale" is also very beautiful, dreamy it brings to mind the airiness of "Lieve" by Marlene Kuntz. It's shoegaze without sounding like shoegaze, intimate and light, closed in itself. After all, even Green Day play punk music but they are not punk, here it's the same, Altro have the shoegaze spirit inside without fortunately forcibly sounding shoegaze. Nothing to do fortunately with the fake-sounding and holographic mimicry of the latest Horrors or A Place To Bury Strangers. Recorded and mastered in the studio (which no longer exists as the liner notes report) of Marcello Piva in Cerasa above Fano, near Pesaro, between May and June 2001, "Candore" is a record that might please you. Not a masterpiece, but you might still like it.

It's tough being part of a minority.

When Sara and I were walking in via Roma, on Wednesday morning market day, among the stalls, it happened that we also talked about music. She would ask me whose album I had bought or who my favorite band was.
When I answered "the Who," she turned and looked at me as if I had told her I was part of a sect that worshiped a Marmot God, and asked me, "Who, the Pooh?".
Then, embarrassed as anyone who sees their right to worship a marmot god slighted, I replied: "No the Who, they are an English band".

Synthesizing in four words the glories of one of the best bands ever, stuff which, if certain intransigent fans had heard me, I would have risked the guillotine instantly.
But her eyebrow maintained its sinuous interrogative position while she looked at me walking.
Then I added, with the sad air of someone whose marmot god is further mocked, "...you know the one from the CSI opening".
Another phrase that would never have earned me the sympathies of hardcore Who fans.
And her "Oh yes" concluded our musical chat, as we walked towards school talking about other things.