Cesare Cremonini
Bagus

IT'S NOT JUST A RECORD FOR TEENAGERS

If someone were to ask me if Bagus met my expectations, I would say yes. In fact, it exceeded them. I bought it almost by chance, after last summer when a (much younger) colleague filled our coffee break with an enthusiastic account of a good Cesare concert in Bologna. What's the big deal, I thought! And just to start with something—since I had nothing by Cremonini—I purchased his first solo album (from 2002) expecting, let's say... the post-adolescent follow-up to Lunapop. Granted, I have nothing against songs for teenagers (I still remember mine after at least two generations of singers and honestly they weren't anything spectacular) but I found something more here. Echoes of Brit-pop (think the Oasis' "She's Electric" for "Piccola Ery" with accompanying Beatles-style guitars) and nods to the best Italian popular singer-songwriter tradition of the '70s (his vocal style between Venditti and De Gregori with the advantage of being less cryptic than the latter in his lyrics) and then onto the '80s with Gianni Togni.

It's an album of love songs, but not only; some are a bit light in their lyrics ("Jalousie; Latin Lover; Due Stelle In Cielo") or somewhat rhetorical (the "Chopin prelude" in "E Invece Sei Tu") while others are definitely more interesting ("La Cameriera Dei Giorni Più Belli; Mary Seduta In Un Pub; Mille Galassie") leading to my favorite: "Padre Madre," which for its incisiveness, reminded me (exaggerating, of course) of John Lennon's "Mother." There’s also an acoustic piano in the final title track, a bit like Allevi, but it’s always pleasant and ties back to that sense of positivity and well-being suggested by the Indonesian title and the meticulously designed graphic part in Hindu mythology style.

I can't help but speak well of the twenty-year-old Cesare Cremonini (the only thing I found a bit cloying in his singing is that insistence on dragging out the open vowels) and maybe I'll listen to him again in a more mature album.