•
Rating: The latest from Baustelle is an album difficult to decipher, heavily influenced by the present day. Tensions and anxieties are calibrated, the outlines shaded with romanticism: but it is a nostalgic, plastic romanticism. Almost out of place. The atmosphere is the same the Mayans would have breathed if they had existed until last December, a heavy, vertical atmosphere toward their own end. And it is an end that is the full realization of existence: the extinction of the human race, a race made up of shells rather than people, shells intent on doing or suffering harm, shells without substance & full of pain.
There is something wrong in all this, but that sense of beauty that opened a way out in "Amen" is not recovered, and the only panel of real happiness ("Death (no longer exists)") is given by an ecstatic vision of a romantic who must escape reality to find a scrap of heart and be able to move forward. The rest is a descent that feels so much like déjà-vu (déjà-vu, I make it explicit, not in the pleonastic sense of the term, but precisely in that of perspicuous inevitability), starting with a declaration of distrust ("Nessuno") and ending with a declaration of surrender ("Radioattività"): in between, there are pieces that feed the necessity of the end. There are those who kill the love of their life ("Contà l'inverni"), there are those who cling to a nonexistent space ("Diorama") &c. Here and there are some splashes of hope, vague and very diluted, that cast little light on an ocean of night like summer fireflies.
The album seems constructed like a disaster film, with opening and closing credits, as well as Morricone reminiscences; someone has compared it to de André's first concept, others have highlighted the maturation initiated with the previous "I mistici dell'occidente," already far from the harsh adolescent moods that still vibrated in "Amen". And yes, there are Baudelaire, mysticism, and many other things, but this is not the predominant side of the album, just as its catastrophic side isn't either, because this album eludes maddeningly. It eludes in an unpleasant way, and, after listening to it, the feeling is that of the unsaid, of having missed something of a story we know by heart.
One must have faithnavigate through outer spaceassume the afterlifebecause we are too accustomedto feeling badto protecting ourselves from the sunfrom radioactivityTracklist and Videos
Loading comments slowly
Other reviews
By Jacopo Bencini
"Fantasma is to be listened to alone in the car, alone in the room with the hi-fi at sufficiently high volume, in the theater."
"Bianconi has finally found the courage to be a songwriter for real. The result is majestic."
By Taurus
"This event marks a definite retreat of the guitar and of Claudio Brasini's executive contribution..."
"We would have preferred more minimalistic, less bombastic and majestic atmospheres, whose slavish use of the orchestra and the duration tend to amplify a feeling of heaviness caused by excessive baroquisms."
By piepa1978
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.
If we could indeed believe that death no longer exists, only then could we say we live freely, without weights.
