Baccini
Stasera teatro

It had been a while since a new CD by Francesco Baccini was released, and I naively believed that having sung alongside Fabrizio De André in the distant 1990, celebrating the pride of a city in red and blue, could make him feel so proud as to border on snobbishness. Instead, one evening I found him on Raidue setting up a fake soap opera with the fake naive Dolcenera... sic! Yet, before everyone else, Baccini had sarcastically named names in an album, denouncing with witty irony a worn-out conformism of singer-songwriters without courage who became slaves to overly simple rhymes.

Now, he even finds himself singing songs by others, a clear sign that under this sun, the ideas have melted! Surely, Baccini wrote the new (new?!) songs well before embarking on the reality show, but he certainly didn't get lost there in the music farm; he had already forgotten the taste for risk in those seemingly nonsensical melodies that brought him success. Those who haven't listened to his previous albums, appreciating and loving the playful and entertaining way of combining seriously joyful music and words, in STASERA TEATRO! (Emi Music) might even discover a Baccini that is outgoing and cheeky, or a romantic minstrel singing about love as if you love me and don't know it, or a composed jester never taking himself seriously. However, the songs bearing his signature in this album are truly all banal and predictable, nothing compared to the past: maybe it would have been better if he had actually gone to live in Norway!

Unfortunately, Baccini the singer-songwriter no longer exists, and now he finds himself doing karaoke of himself, in endless boredom and flatness... fortunately very brief, just over thirty minutes.