Colapesce
Un Meraviglioso Declino

"The wind, the smells. No. A distant song. Or my step on the cobblestones. In the darkness, I don't know. But I know I'm home." Elio Vittorini, Return - Sicilian Almanac.

The music of Colapesce, a Sicilian himself, immediately brings me back to the writing style and the themes dear to the literature of Elio Vittorini, particularly his chronicle-like and succinct poetic remembrances. Succinct, in a manner of speaking. A good writer has the gift of presenting before your eyes, with a few words, vivid and perfect images, something more than photographs, something less than the fluid reality. Colapesce writes his lyrics and music well. Active snapshots, cleverly torn from a morphine-like and dreamlike world, brought with due skill into the realm of the living and awake. For instance, you could imagine a beach stretching for kilometers with very few umbrellas, where everything is still and only the water is moving. You can hear the pleasant and gentle roar on the shoreline. You can feel the water vapor on your skin due to the relentless summer evaporation. You can smell the scent of fish, or the musty scent of keel wood left a little further on. Whatever is said, everything seems to be a return. The soundscapes developed by Colapesce & band are multisensory; the music is the triggering cause, the rest follows on its own. Thanks to these fourteen tracks, one gets the impression of being able to give oneself a lucid and visionary image every day, always different and evergreen. "A Wonderful Decline" is a generous album in every sense. It conveys opulence and warmth, human and meteorological warmth, and a dry mouth from an afternoon nap around three o'clock in August. There are sudden awakenings, sweaty, with the heart in the throat, or you let yourself be taken by the noble boredom of days too similar to each other.

It is a well-crafted songwriting, melancholic enough, soaked with dreamlike atmospheres but capable of looking reality in the face. Therefore, with "A Wonderful Decline", one moves, nimbly, among themes that can be touched, analysis of small things that suddenly illuminate in all their decisive significance. Colapesce gives me the impression of the aseptic complexity of a Battiato aligned by the pragmatism of Battisti. It also makes me think that all the claimants to the throne of the '90s (Gazzé, Fabi), but also the '00s (Dente), have inadvertently contributed, with their insipidity, to the birth of something good, genuine, meaningful.

Fourteen meticulously crafted tracks, Mediterranean at first glance but with a current taste and easily marketable even in northern lands, sounds designed to gather "yeses", the ability, according to the writer, to know how to collect consensus in more or less mature audiences. And, I repeat, fourteen tracks without falling in tone, if you consider that the tone is almost always that of a heart that does not want to stop beating but wants to do so calmly. An album for cars moving wearily, following the path of seafronts at sunset. Songs that have seen much and help the listener not to feel alone and lost in a summer that, like never before this year, promises to be retro.

A revelation from 2012. Definitely, an album of taste for lovers of the genre.