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Rating: The notes of the Soviet anthem, accompanied by a drumline with a marching pace, mark the opening of this third full album by CCCP. "A ja ljublju SSSR" is an extraordinarily evocative piece, conjuring the Kremlin in the background and Red Square filled with a crowd of men and women with fists raised to the sky.... "I want to smell the heavenly taste of iron, I want to see the sanguine scent of fire"
The three following tracks are typically punk in rhythm and typically CCCP in lyrics, angry diversions yet laden with a melancholic bitterness... politically engaged, yet already resigned like a strange procession in the endless suburbs of East Berlin on a drunken rainy night. "Conform to whom conform to what Conform to what strange pose It goes worse it goes better I can't say I don't know""Give me a hand to set fire to the Po Valley plan" State of Agitation is a disturbing and ritually hypnotic free-noise that drags into mechanically claustrophobic environments before merging into the prayer "Libera me Domine", all organ and voice. Manifesto is a masterpiece that transcends the limits of punk, with hypnotic and repeated guitar riffs under which the bass plays minimalist and Ferretti declaims harsh words towards a system that has already entered the twilight "Soviets plus electricity do not make communism", "You deserve more than a guaranteed place, which you will not have"; then the rhythm becomes harsher, the text becomes confused with Ferretti dismantling and reconstructing in an apparently disorderly manner phrases that express the doubts of a conflicted communist "Great is the confusion above and below the sky Daring is impossible, daring, daring is losing Great the impossible, daring is the confusion The sky is above and below Great the impossible, daring is the confusion".
Hong Kong and Sura look to the East as a new source of inspiration, the former being more of a play, while Sura is an almost instrumental piece sustained by an electric guitar drawing harem arabesques on a very artificial and almost robotic rhythm carpet. The same rhythms for Radio Kabul, while "Inch'Allah ça va" which closes the album melds atmospheres of an Emilian dance hall with aromas of a Parisian café and melancholy of Middle Eastern exiles. On the cover is a faded image of a car factory assembly line ("I honor the arm that moves the frame" they say in A ja ljublju SSSR), and the mythical symbol, used here for the first time....
Almost twenty years have passed, and yet, despite the world, especially that of CCCP, having completely changed, their melodies, rhythms, and even the verses, while sounding genuinely vintage, retain a modernity that should not be surprising, since the doubts of mankind are at play, doubts that will never fully be dispelled.
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