coolermaster

I have always thought that Music is inextricably linked to moments of life... It enters you when you least expect it… Just like it happened to me, about twenty years ago, while I was returning from dinner, in a taxi... It was deep night, I would say almost morning, a spring night, cool and illuminated... and the sleepy taxi driver listened to Radio 1 to keep me and himself company, at a low volume, which added to a sort of magic, a lullaby that instead of waking me up, made me reflect, think about what I had done that day, what I would do the next day... I was relaxed, happy... It was right in the midst of my memories of the evening that, so quietly, out of nowhere, the legendary Radio 1 played "Com'è profondo il mare"... Back then I was an incurable Anglophile, and I had just started to (re)discover Italian music... I immediately recognized Dalla's voice, of which I knew songs hits like "Attenti al Lupo" or "Caruso"..., but that one... Never heard it before... I focused first on the music, as I usually do, and its rhythm vaguely reminded me of "Velasquez" by Vecchioni (by the way contemporary), but the lyrics, no... No offense to Professor Milanese, but here we were on other levels... Dalla's words entered me like boulders, like a sort of "Sumerian tablet" to decipher, and there I was like Champollion, excited and dismayed... And Lucio continued his allegories filled with realism, in a magical, surreal balance, but at the same time concrete... A concrete surrealism, I would dare say, and forgive me the oxymoron...
And that night seemed to me one of the happiest and most important until then...
Then I discovered "Anna e Marco", "Disperato Erotico Stomp", "Stella Di Mare", and dozens of others... And Lucio entered me like only "the other Lucio" has done over the years... Immense...

It was one of the first CDs I bought (I was a devoted vinyl collector until around 1994) and one of the first by the Nomadi, a band that, thanks to a now-defunct radio station and a song that stuck to me (one of the last by the great Augusto), made me appreciate them... An incredible Live, recorded in a stellar way, containing that song I adore (Mercanti e Servi), an amazing version of "Gordon," and other hits, both old and new... I believe it is indispensable as Daolio's spiritual testament and as a guide on how a Live should be recorded... I would almost call it a "Made in Italy" of the Nomadi, after someone else's "Made in Japan"... ^^

I mean, let me get this straight... (coming from someone who has always criticized Baustelle, perhaps somewhat biased)... This album is heavy, arrogant, grandiloquent, extravagant, and dazzling—add whatever you want... And what about Fabio Zuffanti with his various incarnations? Where do we put him... Why do you hum the "cycle" of the seasons of Hostsonaten in the shower? Or "La Maschera di Cera"? Or even better, Finisterre? Or Rohmer? (All bands of Fabio Zuffanti)...
And what about the latest from his English mentor (and colleague) Steven Wilson? Which can't be more blatantly 70s PROG? And the latest from Opeth?
Ah no, I imagine those are fine, especially the Anglo-Saxon or European ones...
But if an Italian band manages to combine (let's say, crossover works) certain "movie" music from the 70s, Pop, Rock, and Italian singer-songwriter vibes, rising above, say... Arisa, Modà, or Emma Marrone (with all due respect to those singers), they get slammed... Slammed by whom? By those who might praise trash bands like "UfoMammuth" or "uochi toki," making colossal rubbish that is also derivative (nothing that a Swiss band called Shiver didn't do 43 years ago, not to mention the usual suspects like Vanilla Fudge, Floyd, Sabbath, Tangerine Dream, etc...), but basically obscene?
What do people criticize Baustelle for? Bianconi’s jerk face? Yes, he has a jerk face and is probably also snobbish, radical-chic, and a bit of an asshole... But who cares! I don't have to go to dinner or vacation with him...
Then, what else? It’s a pretentious record, fine… There’s an orchestra behind it… WOW!!! AND FINALLY!!! Christ, you can hear the orchestra in a Pop album like in the beloved seventies, Studio 1, Rai, Vanoni, Mina, do you remember???
Maybe not, you don’t... I do because I’m 50 years old.... Above-average compositions, above-average music, above-average lyrics for ITALIAN standards in 2013... Are they successful? YES, and this should only be pleasing because it means that 25 years of Mediaset, TV, knights, jesters, dwarfs, and dancers haven’t completely destroyed the neural connective tissue of Italy...
Cheers...

I'm tired of reading the usual nonsense... When it comes to Music, I'd like to remind "you gentlemen" that while Elvis, John Lennon, and all their "little protégés" were strumming their guitars, the music we call classical—more accurately termed "cultured"—was moving forward... It's not that "classical" music, as many believe, died with Beethoven or Mozart, right? Figures like Edgar Varèse, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Prokofiev, Messiaen, Bartók (just to name a few) shattered the boundaries that Bach and Vivaldi set in the 1700s... Messiaen was the first to introduce a sketch of a synthesizer into a symphony in 1940... Bartók, in the early 1900s, introduced "Percussions" into the "concerto" form; the Second Vienna School brought us dodecaphony or atonal and semi-tonal music... Ligeti began his journeys into outer space long before Pink Floyd... Varèse started using electronics in the 1950s (!!!!), when Lennon and McCartney were still doing rockabilly in the dumps of Liverpool... Then we come to Penderecki and Lutosławski... Stravinsky with "The Rite of Spring" began the psychedelic trips 60 years before Psychedelia... (because you can only appreciate The Rite of Spring under acid)... This is stuff that not only make Pink Floyd disappear in the face of such individuals, but also the much-declaimed Captain Beefheart, Zappa, Wyatt, Velvet, and anyone else who might come to mind...
If we talk about innovation, form, sound exploration... (listen to Penderecki's "De Natura Sonoris" if you have the courage, far more than A Saucerful of Secrets... or all the stuff that Scaruffi gets lost in)... Then there were the semi-conservatives like Rachmaninoff, Strauss, Shostakovich (the last great symphonist in history) who brought the "Mutatis mutandis" to the Late Romanticism of the late 1800s, some influenced by Tchaikovsky and Krakaturian, while others drew from Mahler or Holst...
Why did I say this? Because PINK FLOYD did the same thing with ROCK... American psychedelia is inconsequential (really) compared to the explosive, iconoclastic fury of Barrett and his mates... The Beatles' version is pathetic... No one says they are the most influential group in the history of music... But in the history of ROCK, perhaps yes, and maybe let's drop the 'perhaps'... Because there were many valid groups at that time, really many... But every time I (re)listen to YES, E,L&P, Genesis, the early Crimson, the ZEP themselves, or whoever you want, I often find them dated... redundant, gaudy... Bourgeois.... With Pink Floyd, however, I experience the same thing that happens when I listen to Beethoven, Bach, Chopin... CLASSICS.... Timeless classics that do not age, that stand there to remind us how these four posh kids from Cambridge, like all bourgeois, made the revolution... In a few songs and an album in 1967, and then they continued their own personalized discourse that will influence hundreds of bands but won't create imitators or copycats...
So, Pink Floyd were the Berio, the Ligeti, the Stockhausen, the Shostakovich of ROCK... and that's how we must judge them...
Best regards.

I'm tired of reading the usual nonsense... When it comes to Music, I'd like to remind "you gentlemen" that while Elvis, John Lennon, and all their "little protégés" were strumming their guitars, the music we call classical—more accurately termed "cultured"—was moving forward... It's not that "classical" music, as many believe, died with Beethoven or Mozart, right? Figures like Edgar Varèse, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Prokofiev, Messiaen, Bartók (just to name a few) shattered the boundaries that Bach and Vivaldi set in the 1700s... Messiaen was the first to introduce a sketch of a synthesizer into a symphony in 1940... Bartók, in the early 1900s, introduced "Percussions" into the "concerto" form; the Second Vienna School brought us dodecaphony or atonal and semi-tonal music... Ligeti began his journeys into outer space long before Pink Floyd... Varèse started using electronics in the 1950s (!!!!), when Lennon and McCartney were still doing rockabilly in the dumps of Liverpool... Then we come to Penderecki and Lutosławski... Stravinsky with "The Rite of Spring" began the psychedelic trips 60 years before Psychedelia... (because you can only appreciate The Rite of Spring under acid)... This is stuff that not only make Pink Floyd disappear in the face of such individuals, but also the much-declaimed Captain Beefheart, Zappa, Wyatt, Velvet, and anyone else who might come to mind...
If we talk about innovation, form, sound exploration... (listen to Penderecki's "De Natura Sonoris" if you have the courage, far more than A Saucerful of Secrets... or all the stuff that Scaruffi gets lost in)... Then there were the semi-conservatives like Rachmaninoff, Strauss, Shostakovich (the last great symphonist in history) who brought the "Mutatis mutandis" to the Late Romanticism of the late 1800s, some influenced by Tchaikovsky and Krakaturian, while others drew from Mahler or Holst...
Why did I say this? Because PINK FLOYD did the same thing with ROCK... American psychedelia is inconsequential (really) compared to the explosive, iconoclastic fury of Barrett and his mates... The Beatles' version is pathetic... No one says they are the most influential group in the history of music... But in the history of ROCK, perhaps yes, and maybe let's drop the 'perhaps'... Because there were many valid groups at that time, really many... But every time I (re)listen to YES, E,L&P, Genesis, the early Crimson, the ZEP themselves, or whoever you want, I often find them dated... redundant, gaudy... Bourgeois.... With Pink Floyd, however, I experience the same thing that happens when I listen to Beethoven, Bach, Chopin... CLASSICS.... Timeless classics that do not age, that stand there to remind us how these four posh kids from Cambridge, like all bourgeois, made the revolution... In a few songs and an album in 1967, and then they continued their own personalized discourse that will influence hundreds of bands but won't create imitators or copycats...
So, Pink Floyd were the Berio, the Ligeti, the Stockhausen, the Shostakovich of ROCK... and that's how we must judge them...
Best regards.

@PIPPOCALIPPO

I think you and I have had a similar musical journey... I too, after 25 years of more or less cultured Rock, more or less cultured Pop, and Jazz, have arrived (or rather, returned) to classical music, and after quickly exhausting Baroque, Classicism, and Romanticism, I'm now exploring "Contemporary"... Berio, Nono, Ligeti, Shostakovich, Dallapiccola, Malipiero, Messiaen, Hindemith, Penderecki, and many others...

But I still gladly listen to certain music, and it’s always present in the playlist on my iPhone...

ciao

If this record can be compared to anything, it's to what Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, and Tangerine Dream were doing in Germany, and in England, well, I think of "Soft Machine," "Curved Air," and so on... With Prog. it has nothing to do... (thank goodness, for once...)

Pavelo, I remember you...
So: I know England very well since part of my family is from there, as I mentioned to JJ back in the day... I can assure you that trends there last about as long as a cigarette... If the United Kingdom is a very conservative state, conservative in everything from cuisine to the form of government, it is not when it comes to art... Especially music... Having not had a true, exclusive "tradition" over the centuries, as could be said for Germany, Austria, Italy, and to some extent France, it is extremely progressive... Open...
I can assure you that the average Englishman in the '70s listened to the equivalents of what we had as "Ricchi e poveri," "alunni del sole," etc... And even within the more "cultured" scene, namely the Prog scene, there were already much more melodic bands, the most important of which were Barclay James Harvest and Styx, later joined by the "Alan Parsons Project," the swan song of Prog... There was the transition from Prog to Punk, from Punk to Wave (in all its forms), leading up to the so-called "Synth pop" or "New romantic"... All this in less than 10 years... The discussion is complex and I don't want to go over it again...
As for the Pooh, this album is undoubtedly their best work from the symphonic era, absolutely superior to Parsifal, and unjustifiably underrated... The mere suite "Un tempo, una donna, la città" is worth the purchase... But there are, as mentioned by the reviewer, various gems... The more I listen to it, the more I sense the maturity compared to its predecessor... It’s a triumph of baroque elements, symphonic sounds, and very valid intuitions, with one eye on Puccini and the other on Bach... The production is grandiose and approaches formal perfection... Undoubtedly superior to "Poohlover" and "forse è ancora poesia," which were the last two of the "baroque" period and sold much more, especially the first... It was also thanks to the failure of "UPDNTM" and "FEAP" that the Pooh changed (also due to the break with their manager Lucarello) their musical direction and produced three more great records of Pop with some fusion, very much "American sounding"... Until STOP, which FOR ME closes the Pooh era... Another greatly underrated album and among the best...
For me, the best of the Pooh musically speaking are "Un po' del nostro tempo migliore," "Viva," "Alessandra," and "Stop"..."Boomerang" goes just behind those...
Period.
Regards.

I agree with Mayhem when he takes on the role of "anti Scaruffi," which seems to be the attitude of many, including his detractor Senmayan...
However, we reach a point (like with art, Imho...) where subjectivity cannot exist and we must conform to a truth, perhaps unpleasant and antithetical (to us), maybe stated by others, certainly, but unequivocally sacred...
The Black Sabbath invented Heavy Metal. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts...
There are no Amon Duul, Jacula, Steppenwolf, Mc5, Cream, and countless others that could even scratch a nanometer of this truth...
The first two albums are the Genesis, they are the extreme consequence of "electric blues," brought into a no-return territory... I don’t even consider them Hard Rock, can you believe that... Never thought of Paranoid or BS as Hard Rock... They’re not even Amon Duul II, who played “spatial” Kraut Rock, indebted (or maybe it's the other way around) to bands like Hawkwind, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel...
Without a doubt, the Sabbath were much closer to obscure underground bands (as Mayhem rightly pointed out) like KISS INC or SHIVER (now forgotten that were contemporaries of Zeppelin, Purple, Stooges, and the raucous Anglo-American crew...
If that’s the case, even the Velvet Underground had a "doom" dimension in their music, but would anyone ever think of classifying them as Hard Rock? (let’s skip metal)... Even the earliest "Tangerine Dream" expressed hallucinatory and astounding journeys, but they are not Hard Rock... It’s like saying: "if a song has a flute and an odd time signature then it’s PROG..." And who said that? Just as being "doom" or "Metal" doesn’t necessarily require (who said Stoner?!?) slow tempos, raw and syncopated riffs... At this point, Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream were also metal...
A clank of distorted guitars does not make METAL, maybe Hard Rock... Because otherwise, even Creedence Clearwater Revival, Hendrix, Doors, Blue Cheer, Steppenwolf would be METAL... And it’s not enough that a song by the latter had the phrase "Heavy metal thunder," from which a witty journalist birthed (ipse dixit) Heavy Metal...
And where do we put Iron Butterfly? In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida? Was that metal? NO. It was Heavy Rock... ROCK, not metal...
And Uriah Heep, a great and highly underrated English band? They played HARD PROG... A mix between Progressive and Hard Rock that was fundamental for the birth and development IN AMERICA of the genre that would be called AOR (Adult Oriented Rock)...
And the Sabbath?
With their third album, with TRACK ONE, they invented METAL... Yes, because SWEET LEAF, as far as I'm concerned, is no longer Hard Rock, is not even Heavy Rock, is not Prog, is nothing... Or rather: it’s the year zero of METAL... Followed by the famous (a song on which a book wouldn’t be enough) "Children of the grave," which founded metal not only musically, but especially iconographically... That ride of bass/drums/guitar (Gibson) I believe is, alongside the riff of "satisfaction" by the Stones and a very few other things, the most important thing in the history of rock... And there’s not much to discuss... Just have the ears...
What they did afterward (Vol4) is LUXURIOUS Routine, up until HEAVEN AND HELL (another milestone this time of the so-called NWOBHM)... Although, between us, the NWOBHM was actually started by the Sabbath back in ’69 when they began recording their self-titled album...
The rest, gentlemen, is beautiful, gorgeous, musically superior, no doubt... There have been dozens of bands that could wipe the floor with the Sabbath musically (some I have mentioned), but without these four misfits from Birmingham, TODAY Rock would be much, much poorer...
Best regards.

Christ, is it even possible that in ITALY we always have to make comparisons??!!!
But you know-it-alls, professors of this nonsense, do you realize what was topping the charts in the celebrated, fabulous, praised seventies in the USA or the UK?? Are you so provincial that you think everyone at that time listened to King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Santana, Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath???
But do you know “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies? How many copies did it sell? And Bread? Shall we talk about them? And Chicago? And Minnie Riperton? And Barry Manilow? ...and I could go on infinitely.... THESE were the bands, the songs that sold millions of copies across the Alps in the '70s!! “Hold the Line” by Toto, “Don't Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult!!
And no one ever thought to compare these POP stars to niche ROCK stars...
Just to be clear, no one ever cared about progressive music outside of Italy!! My uncle is English and as soon as he hears Floyd or King Crimson, he has a paralysis... Because HE, and his friends, listened to SOMETHING ELSE!!! They listened to 10cc, Slade, and Bryan Ferry....
So I ask, why do we have to compare Pooh to Le Orme, or to PFM???
Why???
Sure, the Italian prog scene was second perhaps only to the English one, but how long did various "Museo Rosenbach", "Osanna", "Quella vecchia locanda", "Metamorfosi" last? Three, maybe 4 years... Then nothing...
And have you ever wondered why? Because suddenly everyone became punks, or wave fans?? No, my dear gentlemen, because as a musician and jazz lover once told me, it's much harder to make a song based on three or four chords that goes down in history than a prog suite... Any idiot coming out of the conservatory can do that.... And many of the young sprouts who joined the famous "pop bands" (as prog was called back then) had those roots... Then, when it was time to make the leap (see PFM, BANCO, OSANNA, not to mention the lesser-knowns), they produced atrocious crap... Because THEY couldn’t make a three-minute song anymore... Reinventing a sound was out of the question...
The Pooh, on the other hand, have transcended fashions, both social and musical. Facchinetti seamlessly transitioned from the Hammond to the Farfisa, from Moog to the first Roland and Korg... They changed their style at least three times, those much-criticized Pooh, always putting themselves on the line, questioning themselves...
unlike others, who died when the shift from "beat" to "Progressive" happened, and then from "Progressive" to "Electronic Pop"...
The Pooh, even back in the STOP days, utilized the sound engineer from Pink Floyd, went to California to record, and the sound of that album is extraordinary even today.. Who was doing that in Italy?
Talk about what you know, it’s better….
Regards.