bogusman

I'm not saying that CINR isn't a "perfect" song and exemplary of its sentimental-radio genre (oh yes!!!), quite the opposite. It’s just that, in my opinion, Battisti NEEDED to break free from that genre that had been exhausted to the bone. If to achieve this it was necessary to churn out rhymed couplets and pseudo New Age banalities, so be it. However, I don't think it was easy for Battisti to reach this form of compositional/executive simplicity, especially for someone who came from million-album successes like the previous two, considering that E already doesn't contain any chart-pleasing gimmicks.
What would it have cost him to make another faded copy of Una donna x amico?
And then, personally, I find Windsurf, Straniero, Scrivi il tuo nome, Mistero to be more than successful: their lyrics, sometimes so flatly descriptive and at other times evocative, have their own meaning. A regained essentiality (minimalist?) running parallel to the music, a great work of subtraction before the great rush towards the ultra-baroque of Don Giovanni...

Not that I disdain linearity and organicity as such (in this sense, E già should be a masterpiece, right?) it’s just that what enriches Dg is precisely the contrast, for example, between electronic parts (unimaginable without the precedent of e già) and acoustic-orchestral parts.
Anyway, getting back to E già, better to have the courage to turn the page completely than to have another album full of dragonflies in meadows and little bow-tied packages...

It is precisely the growing linearity of the works from DG to CSAR that suggests a phase of "mannerism" in the battistipanella oeuvre. What I find splendid about DG is precisely the freshness of the debut work (in fact, DG is a kind of new first album for Battisti), a game in which experimentation (both musical and textual) is alive, creating contrasts, frictions, imbalances, unraveling. All of this is indeed recomposed and reorganized with "l'apparenza" and further "cemented" in "la sposa"...

A masterpiece must have a certain linearity to be considered such? I disagree: for me, creativity comes from deviation, from the unexpected, from the tension created by instability. (Brian Eno claimed to have had some of his "ideas" while standing on one leg, heheheh).
There’s absolutely nothing to smooth out in DG; the amusements, the puzzles fit in perfectly, and so what if not everything can be tied back to that blessed SENSE to take home as if it were a paycheck... (do you remember the interview, Enea?)

Pappalardo and Battisti were quite close at the time: Battisti produced an album for Pappalardo with sounds not dissimilar to those of E già ("Immersione," I believe). It was Pappalardo who introduced Pasquale Panella (who in the meantime had written the lyrics for another Pappalardo LP) to Battisti.

For me, Don Giovanni is a masterpiece that, as such, would justify any previous missteps. I disagree with Enea: I absolutely do not see La Sposa O. as the "finished" album. The greatness of Don Giovanni, for me the absolute masterpiece of Battisti, lies in its heterogeneity. Then what does it mean to "distinguish between finished product and experimentalism"? Okay, let’s distinguish, but it seems to me that the history of rock is full of experimental masterpieces... or not?

here they are

The lyrics are naif, it's true, with some sprinkles of new age optimism, but the singing is almost always up to par with the past (and the future). From a sonic perspective, it seems to me that E già can’t be so easily dismissed as out-of-date technopop, so enriched as it is with studies on electronic rhythm, which are nothing short of fundamental for the subsequent works. It seems to me that E già constitutes a cornerstone without which, for example, we would never have had such a complex and fascinating Don Giovanni four years later.

mmmmh I don't quite agree with your overall judgment. In my opinion, the entire first side stands out brilliantly compared to the second, which is much more subdued (title track excluded). Sure, it’s an album that isn’t perfectly focused, but it’s the result of a choice that is more than bold and radical, far from “neither fish nor flesh.” (that, if anything, was a dreary day.)