Amor Fou
La Stagione Del Cannibale

Amor Fou is the ambitious project of four brilliant minds: Alessandro Raina (former Giardini di Mirò vocalist), Cesare Malfatti (La Crus), Luca Saporiti (Lagash), and Laziero Rescigno, who come together to softly voice the young hearts of two lovers lost amidst the sparkling notes of three decades of Italian auteur music, politics, sex, dreams, and goodbyes. Sung almost like the soundtrack of a 'Nouvelle Vague' feature film, with that nonchalance, that style, those particular sensitivities and freshness that characterized a generation of young and brilliant minds in the '60s, the two lovers bid farewell on the symbolic day of the Piazza Fontana bombing, ('La Strage'; 'Anni Luce'), only to find each other again after thirty years, changed, different, devoid of the passions of those illusory and therefore magical days.

From this blossoms splendidly and elegantly: 'La Stagione Del Cannibale'. A luminous pop-auteur dazzlement in monotonous greyness.

What is sung, with an almost cinematic emotion, is the neo-bourgeois society of the '60s in Italy. The one of student revolts, strong social contrasts, great contradictions, and great hopes. The one of the boom, the first sexual uninhibitions, of loves hidden in some old closed doorway or 'nella casa materna', ('Se Un Ragazzino Appicca Il Fuoco'). But it's also ours, today's: uncertain, ephemeral, free but lost, and the alchemy between the two is perfectly achieved precisely because the intensity of the lyrics and words, as well as the modern arrangements, enriched with that extra pinch of electronics that binds everything so homogeneously, allow every feeling, every sensation to fit well with any past or present situation, dressing only marginally in the long musical shadows of the past.

Tiptoeing into a season 'hungry' for feelings and ideals like this one, a cannibal season of suggestions and magnetisms, of torn and never-restitched illusions can be devastating and ecstatic. The words overwhelm you, unsettle you, stick to you, and become yours. Words and music of an almost literary scenographic refinement, perfectly reflecting consumed passions, wrong returns, burning memories in a constant oscillation of tremors and jolts. The album starts with 'Il Periodo Ipotetico', the key point: the detachment. It opens with the farewell of the two and with the disavowed awareness of the end, the melancholy one, of the idea that if there had been an abandoned place to seize, to escape and take refuge, perhaps everything would have been possible. It opens with the fear that all love may fade if time allows it to evaporate 'passerà se passerà questo pallore che ci rende così simili da perderci'. It's the pallor of love, the hypothetical period of every impossible story, and it is a wonderful track in its calm resignation. Bitter 'La Convinzione' follows, another high point of the production. The conviction of those who did not open up, who did not know how to speak, or who, on the contrary, fled towards 'una destinazione lontana o poco chiara' because deep down, it's more 'noble to fall many times' and having tried aware that suffering is just around the corner or only a matter of time, than remaining closed 'in un grande mare d'attese' or 'in grandi valli di parole poco chiare'.

Raina writes for the first time in Italian and does so with care, moving and saddening, unsettling and touching. Malfatti and the others skillfully and elegantly weave the album's lagoon-like electronic pop around strong emotions and words. Thus, the tracks of 'La Stagione Del Cannibale' follow one another: in a tangle of moods difficult to unravel. Emotional tracks with evocative and barely whispered atmospheres, blinding in the brightness and foresight of thoughts sweet and bitter as a lazy Sunday in the spring sun: ('Cos'è La Libertà'). Pieces that alone can sing the fears of the end ('I Ritorni'); the nostalgia for changes ('senza quasi pensare, diede cose alle cose più preziose e se anche non pianse l'inversione di rotta fu completa'), alive and pulsating in the splendid 'Se Un Ragazzino Appicca Il Fuoco'; the inadequacy of many failed attempts as in the painful and soft 'Venti Giorni Di Vita Di Una Donna Famosa' or in the beautiful and thoughtful 'La Stagione Del Cannibale'. Or again, tracks that know how to sing and tell, vibrating, of a society inert that doesn't move or of a love, that of 'Anno Luce' still clinging to desperate memories 'di un folle pomeriggio' or 'di una lurida fontana'.

The story of the two lovers at this point becomes just a pretext. A compositional pretext to explore love and the human soul, society, its uncertainties, and its conflicting relationship with it.

Elegant, calm, intelligently sensitive, the Amor Fou offer us a pop masterpiece of choral beauty that goes deep, beneath the armor and masks of every individual, digging into time and popular consciousness, until it penetrates with refinement and grace down there where the light dies, where it cannot reach, inside, where everyone gets burned, and where Amor Fou, the crazy one and the one that was, the one of 'colpi di testa' and the 'tremende distanze' hurts more.