Bugo
Sguardo contemporaneo

Nostalgia reigns supreme on Debaser and in my life. Or, at least, as far as the "musical part" of it is concerned.
Memories are tightly linked to melodies and scents, and so when I perceive a particular scent or hear that old refrain, my mind travels back to the glorious moment when I heard it for the first time.

Well, that's not exactly the case with this album, which I discovered in 2016. However, everything about it reminds me of the roaring second 2000s.
Do you remember them? Bell-bottom pants, sideburns, aperitifs, new singer-songwriters, MI AMI when there was no longer Tora! Tora!, in short, being a hipster started being fun.
I, who would have ardently desired to become a long-haired-sideburned-bell-bottomed-alternative, was learning to play the guitar.
It was 2006: do you remember 2006? Many things had not arrived yet, like social networks, smartphones, series on Netflix, Spotify...
Basically, 2006 was a shabby version of 2019, except that if it were today, it would seem like being in India, where everything is stuck in the '70s (or at least it seems so, based on the videos on Youtube).
After all, with such a title, the album Bugo released that year had to be an album suspended in time.

Sguardo Contemporaneo is the follow-up to the very successful and eclectic double album (in the sense that they were two separate albums put in the same container) of 2004, Golia e Melchiorre.
From the previous work, the singer-songwriter maintained a certain fairly intimate poetic line present in the acoustic album entitled La gioia di Melchiorre.
Produced by Giorgio Canali (an "electric" singer-songwriter, former CSI and former PGR, and a highly skilled "old-fashioned" record producer), the album features 12 tracks recorded almost entirely in direct takes and it's a rock album.
The instrumentation is practically all analog, more electric than electronic, and Bugo's voice is imperfect yet present, as if he were sitting at the desk with me, here and now, singing me his songs.

I won't dwell on each track, as it's an album too varied in styles and lyrics: it ranges from light and fun songs (Ggeell and Amore mio infinito) to serious and introspective ones (Gelato giallo and Una forza superiore) without abrupt changes in sound.
With La gioia di Melchiorre, Bugo introduced the theme of love in his songs, and traces of it can also be found here in different ways: Amore mio infinito, inspired by Aldo Nove's book of the same name, tells of a child's infatuation with another child, while Quando ti sei addormentata is a love song only in aesthetics, but is actually a song about love songs.

Millennia, whose chorus gives the album its title, speaks of a vision of reality that is really an escape from it ("...my past is gone / ...I want to be different from myself / always forward / 300 times"), attributing it to the vision of contemporary man, so focused on projecting himself into the future that he no longer sees the world he lives in (or at least, that's the meaning I attribute to this track). For me, this is the song that encapsulates the main message of the album: in all the tracks, there's a core of concern and nostalgia that develops in various ways.
There's the (I'd say religious) call for a desire to be free from worries by embracing life, the nostalgia for lost childhood innocence, the concern for the absence of precious ggeell, the nostalgia for a lost love and gone youth, the concern for work and economic stability.

The presence of so many "adult" themes left several fans bewildered at the time, who saw in the continuous transformation of the singer (from "Beck of the rice fields" to "clone of Battisti and Gaetano") a "betrayal" of a certain lo-fi and nihilistic subculture; however, this change was a sign of the singer's maturity and allowed him to be recognized as a singer-songwriter with his own identity and no longer just a young, scrappy rocker.

Leaving nostalgia behind, it was to the atmosphere of concern of the previous album that Bugo responded in 2008 with a liberating "never mind!" in his C'è crisi, a song that made him known to the wider Italian public with numerous radio plays.
Today Bugo has once again turned everything upside down, starting with his "careers thrown to the dogs" with his move to India in 2011 and resumed in 2014 with his return to Italy, and once again "reset" with leaving Carosello and the independent production of the vinyl RockBugo, which was received heterogeneously by the fans.

Looking back at the second 2000s, it's evident that an evolution has taken place, and not only from a technological point of view.
Today, from the '70s remain the mustaches, from the '80s the FM synthesizers like TheGiornalisti, and from the '90s the tracksuits and synthetic aesthetics.
From those 2000s without personality remain only those artists who had personality to spare, and Bugo is one of them.

Sguardo Contemporaneo may not be Bugo's most incisive album, but it's an album to remember (and to listen to again), and not an album of memories.