Cesare Basile
Gran Calavera Elettrica

A dark and atmospheric album, Gran Calavera Elettrica (Mescal), is a record in which Cesare Basile sings tormented stories suffused with a faint light of sensations as subtle as silk. A wonderful and harsh album, with a gloomy realism. This record has a boundless charm, but it will only reveal itself to you little by little. Distanced from the lights and immediate emotions of the previous Stereoscope and Closet Meraviglia, Basile has looked within himself here.

A contemporary album that, besides being a precise and complete synthesis of the last ten years of Italian alternative music, offers glimpses of vibrations that might appeal to Calexico or to Nick Cave and Tom Waits. Produced by John Parish (already a collaborator of the Eels, PJ Harvey, and others, as well as an excellent musician), who with a magical and lo-fi touch contributed without being intrusive, Gran Calavera Elettrica is indelibly etched deep in the soul of those who know how to listen.

A great songwriter, the Catania native Basile is an authoritative voice that proceeds at times stern and radical, other times contemplative and afflicted, only to suddenly explode in rare liberating moments that express a troubled, repressed anger.

This is a difficult album, borderline, mature, singing of miseries and marginalization, of solitude and despair. Laced with the densest and most visceral blues - at times illuminated by a nocturnal electronic - it is a raw work in appearance, but in reality, very refined and intense. The broken melodies and twisted sounds, the never predictable voices of Nada, Valentina Calvagna, and Marta Collica, the cinematic atmosphere, the direct poetry of the lyrics, the underlying tormented spirituality… all this makes this work roughly elegant and passionate.

There's no point in describing the songs one by one. You can only understand by listening. Invaluable.