Bic Runga
Beautiful Collision

THE REVIEW

Logbook, Auckland, year 2002.
Vast blue horizons, the calm sea, the breeze of the wind that just incites the ripples of the waves, and the magical boats of the America's Cup are all docked at the pier today.
I stroll enjoying the sun of this beautiful New Zealand day, waiting for the wind to rise again and for the most beautiful and fastest boats in the land to cut through sea and sky to compete once more for what is the most prestigious and oldest sailing trophy in the maritime world.
This year, Black Magic is opposed at the final contest by a competitor that swiftly sails across fields and valleys, and although it is performing well in these antipodal seas compared to its alpine lakes, few here are ready to bet on the strength of this team.
But today there isn’t a breath of wind, and everyone is closed up studying final strategies inside impenetrable port sheds and headquarters.
The citadel around the harbor teems with life, there is no agitation of race moments, but the tension for the decisive days of the upcoming challenge has been palpable for some time.
Outside of there, many people walk, talk, and live as always… as always, when it's not a race day!

On my long walk along the ocean's edge, I find refreshment in one of the many colorful bars along the waterfront, and while my friends and I, here to cheer for Mascalzone Latino, talk about how much longer we might need to stay on the other side of the world, a calm music lingers in the air, a girl, whom everyone here seems to know, sings her simple stories and her voice from that moment will accompany us on this journey like the sunlight does with time.

Bic Runga was such a delightful discovery, just as was Bertarelli's victory during the last thrilling regatta.
Two years later, this album has also arrived on our Italian shores, where, however, unlike its native shores, it has not significantly penetrated our iPods, which have now become the new metric tool for a singer's success.
Perhaps because Bic Runga sings an adult music made of syncopated yet slow rhythms, of vocal reflections as delicate as her voice, always graceful in never attacking those who listen to her, a sweet and relaxed pop, never over the top and without arrangements that pander to the charts.

“Beautiful Collision” is the Australasian compromise between Suzanne Vega's “Solitude Standing” and the solitary Michelle Shocked of the early rustic “The Texas Campfire Tapes”, and Bic Runga is a folk/pop singer who finds herself tracing that fine and ideal vocal line first laid down by Rickie Lee Jones and later continued by Edie Brickell.
After all, this CD has long accompanied my life, made of kilometers, of music and thoughts that find continuity solutions between passages under tollbooth arches in a never-ending series of cities, and I am grateful for it.