weseven

I mean, it makes sense for a singer to want to explore different genres, and Cornell definitely had the voice to pull it off. It's also fine for him to do R&B, nothing against the genre. But, honestly, it's an album that’s worth nothing. The rhythms are always the same (the doubling is always the same), identical structures, zero musicality. In my opinion, it's a huge joke, or maybe Cornell is on trips like no one else. 1 essential, mind-blowing.

I had seen and browsed through Dirk Gently at a Feltrinelli...

Great review, I've read the entire Hitchhiker's Guide series by Adams but honestly, I found it hard to capture the freshness and lightness of the first book in the others, except for a few chapters, even though the ideas were abundant and, in fact, much more entertaining. I miss this; how do you rate it compared to the Guide?

Ugly Panda, here’s another singer (as far as I know), but I like him; maybe a more basic singing style and less epic compared to nightfall, but king of the grey island had convinced me.

I made about ~500 by myself for the mogwai in Milan the next day, I don’t know if that’s worse :D
Anyway, I liked them too, even though after several listens they become much less impactful.
Interesting, indeed.

that then, if we want to be picky, there's also an "a me mi" in the last sentence...

Well, frankly, I don't care, I would just suggest that they change the name, keep only Sanremo and drop "festival della musica italiana," which has very little to do with it. I heard Arisa's song on the radio and I liked it, nothing special, but at least it didn't smell like mothballs.

Well, saying that the lyrics of TDS suck is like saying that Joyce's Ulysses is ungrammatical. It might be true, but that’s not the point! Take Eraser, you have the archetype of the man/machine conflict (just to mention, Meshuggah crafted a masterpiece on the theme with Destroy/Erase/Improve a year later, and they weren’t the only ones to tackle it), it starts with binary communication (0/1, need/you, dream/you, et cetera) and explodes into hatred and self-destruction (smash/me, erase/me). And Big Man with a Gun? It takes you along to a somewhat catchy rhythm the delirium of a psychopath (has anyone mentioned the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs?, just that in the background there’s no Stuck in the Middle with You).
There’s a way in things, the lyrics are an integral part of the music; if it had been sung by the Beastie Boys it might have sounded ridiculous, but in TDS it sounds terribly serious. That said, I liked the DVD of All That Could Have Been, I haven’t heard this one.

I'll take note of it.

"A technique and compositional perfection worthy of the best Dream Theater" exclamations! Not to say, but the DT have largely proven over the years that compositionally they don’t hold much value, and beyond the discussion of the first 2-3 albums, they don’t go much further.