coolermaster

Those who criticize the Pooh do so out of bias. For example, when I was 16, I listened to Iron Maiden and Metallica, Pink Floyd and King Crimson... Only Battisti for Italian music... Then I (re)discovered them and among everything I've listened to, "opera prima," "alessandra," "Parsifal," "Un po' del nostro tempo migliore," "Forse ancora poesia" are extraordinary... If they were English, they would fill stadiums just like Queen did...
Guys, if you aren't great professionals, you don't reach the finish line of 45 years of activity... If you can't compose, communicate with people, you fade away...
Sure, they weren't le Orme (another band I rediscovered as an adult), but in terms of production, arrangements, vocal cohesion, and sound blending, they had no rivals at least in Italy...
Have you ever wondered why Orme, PFM, Banco have disappeared from the mainstream scene? Because when they started to stray from Progressive to focus on POP, pure and simple POP, they were way worse than the Pooh... This is the truth, whether you like it or not...
Best regards.

The only two groups that supported Battisti were PFM and Formula 3, just to clarify... A group that, as the reviewer said, threw themselves away too soon, even if Radius with "Carta Straccia" for me reached heights that are hard to match during that time outside of the prog realm... One of the very few records I listen to often and enjoy every single time like a hedgehog...
Here there are excellent performances, not all from the Formula 3... Seeing DIES IRAE, which under other names and other groups (from overseas) had been around since 1969... The best version is undoubtedly "Hey Mr. Holy Man" by Kiss Inc, a German band from the late psychedelia... So we're talking about covers, nice as they may be, but still covers...
As for "non è Francesca," Battisti's version from 1969 was if we want even more revolutionary, for that psychedelic ending with a hint of jazz, an outro that Battisti would revisit more than 10 years later in the album "Una Giornata Uggiosa"...
The rest is quite filler... Undoubtedly, Formula 3 was a very interesting group, skilled musicians who wanted to go beyond, but they got lost, along with thousands of foreign bands during that time, in that sound... Lacking the ability to renew... Within the group, the gap between Radius and the others was too great, with the latter being just honest craftsmen...

In America, which is a bit more seasoned than we silly Italians, when one of the first "keyboardists" of the Moog heard "Noi due nel mondo e nell'anima," he was astounded, so much so that he made an instrumental cover to include in a compilation of covers made with said instrument... I mean, folks, I listen to everything from Monteverdi to Bach, from Beethoven to The Doors, from Pink Floyd to Opeth, but not being left breathless in front of a gem like the aforementioned song, or the title track or "con il tempo, con l'età e nel vento," means that something in the individual's formative journey has definitely gone terribly wrong...

As I always say, the real Pink Floyd ended with ANIMALS in 1977. Their last genuine, complete work. After that, they became Waters' band with the participation of Gilmour, Mason, and occasionally Wright (who is almost absent in The Wall), and later still Gilmour's band with the participation of Wright and Mason... The sound, the Pink Floyd sound is a motto, dead since '77... Even though it was still present in Gilmour's first solo work (definitely the most genuinely Pink Floydian)... Then they became... something else... Another band, another perspective, another sound... indeed... That has nothing to do with what made the group great and innovative from Atom Heart Mother to Animals... The Wall is a great album... If the Who had made it, it would have been Tommy part two... The Final Cut, if it had come from, let's say... Prefab Sprout or Echo & the Bunnymen, would have been a good '80s pop album... Nihilist enough, Orwellian... With a whiff of "nuclear holocaust"...
AMLOR is a technically superior album to those of Waters, excellently recorded, Pink Floydian.... But something is still missing to compare it to WYWH and Animals, to which it clearly alludes... Waters is missing... The spirit of the group is missing... The Pink Floyd sound is missing...

Every now and then, it would be useful to decontextualize our Italic and provincial historical/anthropological vicissitudes and dedicate ourselves more to music... Since, as I always say, "beyond the borders of Chiasso," no one cares about or knows anything about Paninari, Timberland, and Moncler...
Duran Duran are one of the many bands that emerged from the jolt of the electronic "New Wave" at the end of the '70s, which was further reworked in the following decade (thanks to new digital synthesizers, no longer analog, and new recording techniques) to then reshape itself into that subgenre called "New Romantic" or better yet, "Synth Pop".... A genre that often had nothing to do with Pop... Like the very early Duran Duran, where the reminiscence and contiguity with Ultravox or Human League were quite evident...
What the Durans understood was that to break through on a global level, they had to rely on lush productions, trim every claim of intellectuality (present instead in their contemporaries, Ultravox or Human League) to the bare minimum, and above all... Deliver the chart-topping hit.... In their first two albums, the Birmingham quartet succeeded quite honorably, helping to shape a genre alongside many contemporary groups, such as OMD, Twins, Spandau Ballet, Wham, Culture Club, and a thousand others...
The Durans could not count on the (almost) baritone and unreachable voices of Tony Hadley or Andy McCluskey (perhaps two of the best voices in all of British Pop!), nor could they rely on the "puppeteers'" saxophones or the synthetic carpets of the aforementioned groups, but they depended on a powerful, frenetic rhythm section... Dance music, therefore, with "straight" rhythms easy to grasp in the classic manner of disco music...
Whether they made the Paninari (in Italy) dance or the rough dockworkers of some coastal town in England drowning in beer, it matters little... That music was genuinely seductive... The little game worked well for about four years (I also include the legendary Live Arena and Seven and the Ragged Tiger), then the inevitable decline, overwhelmed by internal strife, but also by a wave of music from across the ocean that accompanied my generation... Synth pop declined... at a certain point, inevitably, crushed by the new "echoes" of a renewed Rock... Grunge was still far off, but U2, R.E.M., and dozens of others were slowly eroding that "Brit pop" and its audience...
Regards

The last GREAT film by Dario Argento... The quote (preface) from the film taken from Conan Doyle should be engraved in the minds of many local investigators who always stumble in the dark, leaving madmen, serial killers, and rapists free... Perhaps one of the most intricate and narratively complex plots by Argento... The idea of the "Copycat" serial killer will anticipate years ahead those in American cinema... Some sequences, including the "flashbacks," have always disturbed me... The final scene between Gemma and Franciosa is haunting....

First of all, I would ask those who are not familiar with the syntax of Horror cinema to refrain from making stupid comments. In America, Argento is studied in film schools, and Profondo rosso is the Thriller that forever changed the genre (along with The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). To describe Profondo rosso, from the camera movements to the cinematography to the soundtrack, would require a whole book. The mere scene of the dialogue between Hemmings and Lavia at "Piazza del Nettuno" in Turin, with the famous "Pop Art" painting recreated, is worth the entire filmography of many directors or self-proclaimed ones... On the other hand, Argento was the godson of Sergio Leone, and this is evident until 1987. The film's aesthetics, the "non" essentiality of the plot, even though twists were not lacking until "Tenebre," and the narrative construction was still interesting...
Giallo has some magnificent sequences, I would dare say lush, in a cinema (the horror one) now reduced to being television transported to the big screen in the vast majority of cases... I’ll just mention the dolly shot in the inevitable theater and the one in the fashion Atelier... In the sense of, we know how to move a camera... Then everything gets lost along the way, and Giallo is far from being an interesting film.
Those who criticize "4 mosche di velluto grigio" probably do not know that only the final scene was shot with a German camera that at the time belonged to the scientific structure that would later become CERN... One of the greatest slow-motion scenes in cinema history, alongside that of "Little Big Man" by Peckinpah... What does Bud Spencer have to do with this? What kind of phrase is that? What does Robert De Niro have to do with the latest film by "Muccino"... Come on, please... Moreover, 4 mosche di velluto grigio is, if we want, the "embryonic" version of Profondo rosso, and already in this film (and not in the previous ones), the aesthetics and themes of Argento to come begin to take shape...
Let’s not even talk about Suspiria, which is constantly cited by Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, and all the others among the most "revolutionary" and "subversive" Horror films... Just the sets, the cinematography of this film deserved a couple of Oscars... Argento is old, gentlemen, but above all, he has always lived "dangerously"... He is a true, authentic anarchist, and perhaps represents in Cinema what De André has represented in music. He has many analogies with Faber... A wealthy bourgeois family, youthful rebellion, and unpopular choices. He breathed an intellectual and cultured family background and tried to "refresh" a genre that until then in Italy was a carbon copy of the Anglo-American one... To the good grace of Freda and Bava.
His "losing his way" coincided with a "messed up" private life, full of unresolved issues, drugs, and alienation... Argento is a misanthrope, shy, a voracious consumer of cinema and music... He listened to Tangerine Dream or Pink Floyd, progressive rock and Fusion when in Italy, the vast majority of people didn't even know who they were...
Robert De Niro hasn’t made a noteworthy film in at least 20 years. Does this make him a bad actor tout court? Carlo Verdone stopped doing "commedia all'italiana" at least 15 years ago (to be generous)... Should we throw him out altogether?
Chaplin, in the second half of his career, made some sound (stricto sensu) nonsense: should we consider Chaplin a hack then?
I would ask for reflection before hitting the keys... Always...

Perfectly agree with Valerio. Sgt. Pepper's in 1967 seemed like "our Psychedelia..." that crude, patched-together, studio-crafted stuff with billions of "Sound Equipment" in the Abbey Road studios...
It's a pity that in another studio, four unknowns were redefining the history of rock with that "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn," which is the pinnacle of psychedelia... Not to mention the Doors, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Who, Small Faces, Nice of Keith Emerson, Moody Blues, Procol Harum, etc... etc...
In the face of such psychedelia (or the realms of psychedelia), Sergeant Pepper dulls...

the last of the romantics...After him....the avant-garde deluge...

@FRANCESCOCONGES

Because they were... period. Without Bach, music would have stopped at the "madrigals," and without Beethoven, we wouldn't have had from Wagner to Verdi, from Mahler to Bruckner... up to Tchaikovsky...

Mozart did some great things, but also some negligible ones, like the violin concertos... They are very beautiful, but certainly not comparable to the piano concertos... Paradoxically speaking (since I’m not a fan), I appreciate Mozart much more for the lyrical aspect than for the rest...

Bach and Beethoven, however, were on another level for me... Just listen to the "Art of Fugue," or two or three symphonies by Ludwig van... 3 or 4 sonatas, and the two concertos (4 and 5)...

As for Bach, well... he’s the foundation...