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Rating: This review begins with a thank you to barrylindon who allowed me not to ignore this concert by pretending to be very busy as is often the case in Milan. Everything worked in my favor: the ticket office was still open at 10, the concert had just started, and there was Damien, in love with Italy, laughing and joking with his audience while crafting his acoustic ballads like little masterpieces.
The atmosphere felt like an evening among friends. Damien's banter was quite bizarre; one moment he dedicated a song to his passion, which turned out to be buffalo mozzarella, another to gorgonzola, and then he joked about the grayness of his Ireland, comparing it to the images in Schindler's List, brightened by the same buffalo mozzarella as if it were the red dress of the girl at the end!
The difference lies in the intimate style of this concert and the approachability of the character and his group: his music warms the heart and his voice intertwines with that of his counterpart, Lisa Hannigan, in splendid melodies with choruses like distant voices, up to the operatic tones of the beautiful Eskimo.
His music also combines other more unusual elements, playing with samples of the last measures performed or with vocal effects in the style of human beatbox, only to return to the tracks of sincere folk, played with a guitar as small as he is and so far removed from the repetitiveness of folk, militant or otherwise, as understood today in Italy.
Damien keeps talking, even too much, and now he tells us that before Milan he performed with his group in Germany, where the cellist managed to get food poisoning from just one terrible salad. The audience bursts into laughter, and instead, we seriously have to say goodbye to the poor girl: what jerks we are, and to think that just a little earlier Damien had told us that the Rainbow had asked him to close, but he would be willing to sing in our own home!!! The important thing is to find a house big enough to host us all, and probably given the variety of the audience present, there might have been some celebrity with a mansion available for the purpose: perhaps Damien had unexpected media coverage on some unsuspected lifestyle magazine and I didn't even notice!
In the most electric moments, he reminds me of Radiohead's ballads; there's something of Karma Police, High and Dry, or Fake Plastic Trees. In The Blower's Daughter there might be an excess, the resemblance of the melody to No Surprises seems evident to me, but this small phenomenon, capable of giving us such an evening, with such a familiar, warm, and enveloping atmosphere, can truly be forgiven everything!
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