Fausto Rossi, a Milanese by birth, known as Faust’O in the music scene, is an emblematic figure in Italian music, or, to be more precise, a SCANDAL-PERSONALITY. Universally regarded as a forerunner of Italian modernist New Wave, he is also a direct inspiration for many of its representatives (among the best known, the Decibel and their former leader Enrico Ruggeri, partly Garbo, along with a number of emerging bands). But while his disciples, more inclined than he is to get promotional backing from the media, achieve public success, he paradoxically remains in the shadows. After three years with a major label, and following an experimental and solely instrumental self-produced album, Faust’O returns to the market with a fifth album. If in the first two albums the influence of Bowie primarily, and then of groups like Roxy Music or the early Ultravox when they were still led by John Foxx, was still evident, by the third "J’accuse…Amore Mio" these influences had become less direct, more blended and internalized into a musical discourse that was decisively moving towards its own complete expressive autonomy. Now with this LP, following the experimental detour (Out Now), he continues directly with the narrative, with the maturity that stems from an actual silence lasting almost two years, but also from a personal, practically unbroken research activity. Faust’O is not a "singer-songwriter" in the usual sense attributed to that term, but a pop-rock singer in the most evolved sense of that word, of a Central European nature with a restrictively Italic-Mediterranean twist. The tracks, both lyrics and music, are his, either solo or sometimes in collaboration. The album was recorded at Studio Radium, where Radium himself plays the guitars, reviving a collaboration that had already begun at the start of Faust’O's artistic career. As already mentioned before, this is the most mature and personal LP of the Milanese artist (though he is actually from Sacile in Friuli Venezia Giulia – isidax). If in "J’accuse…Amore Mio" the neurotic-apocalyptic tones prevailed, here the dark, obsessive tones dominate, embodying an urban vision enriched with rapidly succeeding verbal-sonic images, almost like the ticking of a telex. The voice has significantly improved, becoming more flexibly expressive in both harsh and softer, veiled tones, even if equally unsettling. The broken lines bent to communicate immediate image-sensations seem particularly capable of expressing a certain existential rhythm of European metropolitan life. The sound, as mentioned, is a dark, obsessive, modernist rock, highly visionary in its essence. Among the ten tracks, all noteworthy, we will indicate “Ogni Fuoco” (later reprised in the final “Ultimi Fuochi”). “Stracci Alle Fiamme” and “Cinque Strade,” three rocks with sharp and incisive sounds like swords: the neurotic “Jeraldine,” more closely linked to “J’accuse…Amore Mio”; the hallucinatory “Ae sotterranee,” “Rip Van Winkle,” and especially “Alien”; and finally the soft and bitter pop-ballad “Ch’an Cha Cha” (also available on 45 RPM), with lyrics half in Italian and half in Spanish, which constitutes the ideal follow-up to Faust’O’s previous single, “Hotel Plaza.”
M.I. Excerpt from: CIAO 2001 of the time (1982/83) YOU CAN ALSO FIND IT HERE: www.isidebloginfausto.splinder.com/
