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“Why love is negative”. “True love will destroy us”. “As soon as you meet the Minotaur, you'll die”. “A trickle of blood on the lips, two commas of sperm on the back”. “Delete all his messages in one go for a colossal mistake”. “I haven't understood anything about love that ends, in summer how much shit dries in the sun”.
Love in violence a year ago, violence in love today. More than a twin album, an opposite and complementary album, written afterwards, partly as a reaction, partly as an attempt not to let go of a moment of perfect balance, on the crest that precisely separates the “crosses by the sea” and the “blooming of a rose”, two vast and slippery semantic fields, because they have always been very frequented. Bianconi has taken a liking to it and in a game of antithetical macrotexts, he punctuates his discourse on perfectly dichotomous beginnings, nodes, and endings.
Instead of “Love” there is “Violence”, instead of “Symphonic music” there is electronic music, instead of the king of the sky descending to save the “Little Girl” (who continues to embrace the world that still made her bleed), there is Asterion, “Borges' Minotaur” waiting for his sacrificial maiden in the labyrinth, he would like to talk to her but it is not possible. In the war of volume one there was a saving ending, because “one gets used to everything, bombs, seasons, the calendar”, while in the album of love, one slips into an infernal abyss of incommunicability, in a “house hidden from the gods”.
Never like in this album diptych, has Bianconi worked on the macrotextual dimension: taken individually, the songs can almost seem harmless, one might truly believe these are love songs. And they are, at least superficially. But since they are threads of a broader weave, it makes little sense to evaluate and read them individually. As in the other, there is a first part that posits a hypothesis and a second that overturns it, reverberating backwards; the pain of living was resolved in attachment to life, now love and sex reveal themselves as sick, morbid, hugs that are autopsies, shit dried in the sun: a labyrinth of incommunicability.
An album written on the fly, during a particularly happy tour for the band, that of 2017. The first volume was more calculated, refined, a reflection on the world's evil and yet philosophical and existential adherence to it; this one is instinctive, feverish, insistent (how many times do “baby”, “my love” etc. repeat?) and yet equally mediated, reasoned in its overall outcomes. There's the desire to feel and live truly real, strong, overwhelming feelings, and at the same time the cyclical transience of these: love exists only along with its conclusion. There is the morbid attachment to a “her, you live only for her”, but then the opposite perspective also appears: “Losing Giovanna, on a day of sun the same as the others, regaining freedom”. In the love euphoria, there is the end and in the end, there is rebirth, the unfurling of infinite new possibilities. In short, a snake biting its own tail.
Love is instinct, it is flesh, bodily humors like the seed that appears several times. But man is also something else, he is thought and not just instinct, and inevitably bends over himself, on his cogitations. And then the hugs turn into autopsies, a woman is lost like a bunch of keys, speaking becomes impossible. From the final piece, one looks back: and at that point, the many bloody details that had been overlooked in the love euphoria are noticed: “You see life differently with Veronica, you believe the void suddenly is beautiful”, but it's still void. “She lives for me, but knows nothing of life and pain”, and sooner or later she will discover it. “Love, it's late, it's already the end... in this kingdom of crowns of thorns”, beauty has already disappeared when one realizes it. “You have nothing more, only her. When she leaves you, where will you go?”, a dangerous dependency. Or again, forgetfulness: “You make me forget myself, you make me feel like a better being”. In short, even the most intoxicating and (apparently) positive part of the album (the first seven tracks, excluding the instrumentals) hides many thorns.
Musically, the work is splendid, less "edgy" than the previous one, with more guitars, strings, full sounds, and soaring melodies. Some stiff vocal passages give way to the intriguing vocalizations of a Rachele Bastreghi in great form, but Bianconi also nails the right tones, a bit nasal, less syrupy. Well-paced big guitars, colorful synthesizers, and many fine embellishments (the flute in “Losing Giovanna”), along with choruses as happy as and more than before, make it an album that flows magnificently, with intensity and fluidity. A rich sonic palette, but used with discretion, measure, and increasingly refined aesthetic taste.
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