Baustelle
Fantasma

It's difficult to write a review of an album you loved so much. There's a risk of overemphasizing it by expressing your own feelings rather than providing an objective and detached viewpoint.

Having made this necessary premise (I’m giving a heads-up), what I will do nonetheless is to give my personal point of view mixed with a reinterpretation of the words of Francesco Bianconi, leader of Baustelle, collected from interviews given by him.

"Fantasma" arrives in March 2010 after "I mistici dell’occidente," which had already closed the first artistic phase of the group dedicated to adolescence, marking the passage to adulthood.

In short, time passes for everyone, and so it does for Bianconi, who decides to write a concept album precisely dedicated to time.

In the 7th century, St. Augustine in His Confessions said: “If no one asks me, I know what time is, but if asked to explain it, I don't know what to say.”

Putting time at the center of a musical project is certainly not a comfortable choice. Humans are afraid of time because growing up means having less of it ahead, and the shorter the road gets, the more time becomes a real disease.

This time, in addition to the well-established lineup consisting of the aforementioned Bianconi with Rachele Bastreghi and Claudio Brasini, a new, rather substantial element is added: the Film Harmony Orchestra from Wrocław, composed of 60 members.

Furthermore, we have the presence of as many as two choirs, the Corale Polifonica and the Coro di voci bianche from the Fondazione Cantiere Internazionale di Montepulciano. All arranged by Enrico Gabrielli, composer and multi-instrumentalist, already a member of Mariposa and Calibro 35.

The choice of concept is a courageous one in an era where the only thing that sells is the single. Nowadays, people purchase individual songs online that can be listened to quickly within a jumbled playlist on a smartphone while doing other things, because we no longer have time for anything. Instead, the concept compels us to listen from start to finish, sacrificing the meaning of an isolated song in favor of the Whole.

From Pink Floyd to Fabrizio De André, many great artists have offered us this unique form of musical album, gifting us unforgettable masterpieces.

Let’s now delve into Fantasma.

The cover resembles a poster for a 1970s horror film;

The album opens with the “opening credits” and closes with the “ending credits.” Just like it was a movie soundtrack; the tracks are interspersed with frequent instrumental interludes that mark the rhythm of the listening, perhaps granting a pause for those who find the album strenuous.

Indeed, we are faced with a dense album, difficult, at times heavy (in the positive sense of the term), all built around the passage of time and thus around a ruthless game between the past and future

In the album, the ghost of the past is indeed present, a past that represents what we have been and will no longer be, but also the future is seen as a ghost, and the author will say: "We live a moment - and we tell it in the album - where the future is truly a ghost; it's not only the past that haunts, but also such an uncertain and blurred future."

The third central element of the work is certainly death.

In Western culture, death is a kind of taboo loaded with negative values, something seen as separate from life itself and in antithesis to it, in front of which it is even advisable to make superstitious gestures! In this album, however, it’s discussed with an attempt to address the theme in a different, less negative manner, because in reality, death in other philosophies and religions is simply a transition, a change of state.

Not bad for someone who declares themselves absolutely pessimistic and always ready for the worst, yet in this album manages to open up a perspective towards hope. Despite the dark, ominous dress, Fantasma leaves the listener with an aftertaste of positivity. He himself will declare:

"The fact that the word ‘life’ appears many times, as does the word ‘children,’ are unconscious signs of wanting to live."

In short, death no longer exists.

This is indeed the title of the single that leads the album, a love song, in my opinion, spot on, centered on the idea of an elderly man singing a song-mantra to his companion to cancel death. That if we could indeed believe that death no longer exists, only then could we say we live freely, without weights.

We arrive at the chapter I consider the most interesting in Baustelle's work, I am talking about "Nessuno," the second track of the album.

"I don’t believe in the Bible/I wonder why I should consult it: it offends the gods/I don’t pray to the church and the stench it makes," it begins.

It is an extraordinary song of love and despair together; the protagonist drowns in his nihilism and no longer believes in anything, in religion (Bianconi declares himself an atheist), in priests who preach well and act badly, in charity that is false, in the market (already harshly criticized in Amen’s "the free market has its days numbered" from 2008), he doesn’t believe much less in the rulers and their dirty power games (who will be "the son of a bitch who contracts out the RAI"???) in all this black sea he finds in his beloved the only fixed point and wondering why she chose him precisely, he begs her, begs her to stay close and give dignity to his existence.

In this sort of reverse creed I found a similarity with a masterpiece written by John Lennon in 1970, "God". Even in that track, the protagonist listed all the things he no longer believed in (including the Beatles themselves) to end with: “I just believe in me, Yoko and me”.

But that's a whole other story.

"Futuro" is the title of the eleventh track. The poignant and desolate melancholy of

how the future takes away the possibility of becoming and becomes imperfect. Like in Francesco Guccini's "Autunno," in which the protagonist shut indoors thinks confusedly about the mystery

of the many "I will be’s" that have forever become "I was"… The ending is autobiographical and abruptly brings us to reality.

The past now is small (small because distant) and in that past, there's him with two friends lost in the traffic of Pigneto in Rome “many lives ago”.

The nostalgia perhaps for a lost youth and purity. I like to imagine it refers to those summer afternoons of youth in which two friends and a walk are all you can hope to have and you need nothing else, and years later, if you rethink, you cannot but certify the damage caused by time; the hardness, the lost enchantment, the built superstructures, and the neuroses.

Bianconi says: "After all, regretting the past things that do not return is a very overused theme in popular culture, in songs, in pop songs, and in song writing. A track like 'Il Futuro' talks precisely about this and is perhaps one of the most melancholic of the album."

Notably, this is the first time Bianconi tackles the Roman dialect, as a Roman I judge the pronunciation at least revisable, and this occurs in "Conta gli inverni."

This is a song whose theme fits into the classical tradition of Roman music, like "Lella" by Edoardo de Angelis to be understood, and tells of an assassin haunted by the ghost of the woman he slaughtered.

The singing on the album is rich in references (Piero Ciampi, Gaber, De André), and the baritone voice thanks to the absence of drums comes across easily and clearly, at least in the studio.

There would still be much to say, many songs worthy of being mentioned, but I leave one space free, not to bore, that everyone may fill with the curiosity to go and listen to “Fantasma," certainly the album of maturity of this excellent cultured pop band known as Baustelle.