Area International POPular Group
Crac

THE REVIEW

1975. Punk is about to explode, Progressive with its massive dinosaurs is taking its last breaths of a long and intense journey. In Italy, we have learned to love Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Genesis, and maybe some fearless listener has encountered the less successful experiments of the Canterbury scene. In such a delicate, special context, characterized by huge changes, only one name, one brand perhaps survives even more inspired and volcanic than ever.

The brand in question corresponds to the acronym AREA (International POPular Group), the album is the third of the band: "Crac". Area are the Italian Progressive group with a capital P that embody the most experimental and visionary aspects of the genre. Five musicians who blend the novelty of progressive with its irregular times and meters, jazz-rock style improvisation, Balkan musical roots, and experimentation shared with the "Companion on the journey" John Cage with whom Demetrio Stratos, leader of the band, would establish a long and fruitful collaboration.

"Crac" from 1975 represents the album of maturity. After the political concept "Arbeit Match Frei" which brings with it the inevitable controversy about concentration camps and dictatorships, and the bewildering "Caution Radiation Area", with "Crac" the experiments reach the perfect equilibrium with the song form, making the seven tracks of the album a perfect musical mix that encapsulates every significant aspect of Jazz, Progressive, and Avant-garde experimentation. The album kicks off with a brief and rapid experimental introduction: "Area5". Here, Stratos's vocal experiments blend with the almost free-jazz double bass of Ares Tavolazzi, who dons the role of jazz double bassist much more than in the previous album "Caution Radiation Area". Then one of the band's classics, "Gioia e Rivoluzione", kicks in with a piano intro by Fariselli that hints at the "jazzy" perspective within which the band decided to move in this album. The lyrics have never been so strong and polemical: "My rifle is a double bass that shoots on your face what I think about life, with the sound of fingers you fight a battle that takes us to the roads of people who know how to love".

"Implosion" is pure improvisation where the five musicians showcase their enormous technical value with the tight and irresistible drumming of Giulio Capiozzo, a drummer of impeccable technique and taste, and the always throbbing bass lines of Tavolazzi. Stratos doesn't sing and "duels" with his inseparable Hammond organ with bursts of scales, chords, and lightning-fast arpeggios, with a Fariselli who is nothing short of unleashed. Next is "L'elefante Bianco" where uneven timings in pure prog style merge with a rapid instrumental progression indebted to the most varied musical influences in pure Area style. The lyrics are always incendiary. The most beautiful episode of the album is definitely "La mela di Odessa" , a track of astonishing beauty. But it's not just that. Beyond the absolutely devastating drumming of Capiozzo and the great instrumental technique combined with great musicality, there is the title of the track, never so eloquent, and a politically uncomfortable text. Odessa is the name of the Russian city where a young Dadaist of nine Apple hijacked a German ship in 1920. The Russians celebrated the hijacking by blowing up the ship and passengers.

"Crac" is a quick, incisive record, its listening is pleasantly compelling, and the music, the themes addressed are of a unique rawness and vigor. Testimony to this are the last two songs "Megalopoli" and "Nervi Scoperti", which combine the vocal experimentation of Stratos with Avant-garde experimentation with extensive use of effects and hallucinatory distortions coagulated by an omnipresent instrumental progression.

An album to listen to, re-listen, study, capture to understand the other side of the "Progressive", that phenomenon which is not only made in England.