Claudio Lolli
Extranei

As promised, I'm back to tell you about a strange, dark, pessimistic, visionary, hallucinatory, poetic, nihilistic, self-destructive, and quite original album: "Extranei" by Claudio Lolli (and who else could it be?). This 1980 work even brought our eccentric singer-songwriter to debut at San Remo with the track "Come un dio americano," catchy and rhythmic enough to hope that the general public would notice him. And it was not so. The public did not notice this bearded long-haired man (Horror: a beard at San Remo!!) nor did Lolli notice the audience, inadvertently paying back in the same coin. It was indeed difficult to convey (and make digest) to the general public the sounds of this album, light-years ahead of its singer-songwriter peers, which featured new rhythmic solutions, jazz openings, wordplay, and the construction of the tracks themselves, always original and unpredictable.

There are the metrics of "Der Blaue Angel," vaguely reminiscent of Lucio Dalla's "Settima Luna" for dividing the text into 8 chapters, the sparkling "La canzone del principe rospo," a surreal tale sung almost out of metric with a thousand linguistic and literary inventions enriching the piece, or the reference between the two songs "Il Muto," which closes with the line "...fino a che costruirono IL PONTE" and the song indeed "Il Ponte," which in response closes the album with "...lo sguardo sereno de IL MUTO": two mirror songs traced on the same melody, rearranged just enough to perceive the two sides of the same coin, two songs that DO NOT TOUCH each other but live interdependently in the absence of the other. A kind of "concept album," as was done at the time, an open discourse on the incommunicability or impossibility of understanding each other among humans (a bit like Edoardo Bennato's "La Torre di Babele," although here we can't really talk about "canzonette"). Classically progressing with '30s jazz, the track "I musicisti" gives us an unprecedented piece of our musical potential, always ready to question himself and able to get involved with refined and versatile instrumentalists. Equally beautiful is the song "Non aprire mai" with its verses sung on "almost" solar sounds:

"C'è come una tela di ragno diceva, in cui mi sento prigionera, ho sulla pelle qualcosa o qualcuno che senza stancarsi mai ci lavora, mi copre di fili d'argento e mi lascia da sola a camminare in mezzo alla gente, vivere in fondo non è necessario, ma certo non è sufficiente. Ed è per questo, diceva, che io per me preferisco non dover scegliere mai, l'inizio o la fine e nessuna storia, la serenità non sa convivere con la memoria. Non mi sono mai conosciuta, diceva, e scommetto che non mi conoscerò, non saprei mai rigirarmi nei miei angoli ottusi, nei miei angoli acuti, preferisco svegliarmi per caso di notte e poi sparire in bocca al metrò, io preferisco i mesi agli anni, le ore ai giorni, i secondi ai minuti... "

Beautiful, evocative, and dreamlike. Then arrives "double face," a sort of analysis-accusation of a tormented father-son relationship, divided and troubled as is rightful during adolescence. An uneasy and mysterious album, certainly different from the Italian scene of the time (let's remember that "Rock'n'roll robot" by Camerini was emerging, and soon the '80s would land with their trail of glamour and sequins!). Just 37 minutes (a bit short, to tell the truth) of psychoanalytic, imaginative, and intellectual trip (without tiring, which is no small feat!).