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Rating: Cinti Fabio.
Commonly known as Fabio Cinti.
Honestly, I have not the faintest idea who this person is or if in the past he may have released anything significant.
The age discrepancy between us doesn't help: clearly, I am the much younger one.
What I want to understand is whether this so-called "Gentle Adaptation" is meant as a calligraphic homage to the Catanese master or maybe it's a lesser album but worthy of attention or just a useless carnival act past its due time.
Or maybe all three at the same time.
For days-and-days I've had it in heavy rotation: I haven't yet decided if the free-jazz-punk-English spirit prevails over the Russian choirs.
What little I know is that the album it draws inspiration from is (remains) one of the most intelligent and cross-sectional Italian Pop albums of the last millennium, and there's no doubt it takes a fair amount of cod's liver (or reckless ignorance) to confront an opus of such magnificence: the risk of coming out with one's bones shattered is moderately high.
The bearded Fabio seems to face the challenge with clear premises: out with the guitar, keyboards, and percussion that served as the framework of the early eighties vinyl, in with a purely chamber-classical instrumental arsenal: two violins, a viola, piano, and cello.
The attack strategy finds me in agreement: nowadays it seems there's far too much useless noise and this ecological option is a strategy endowed with both reason and sense.
The morphology of the tracks remains essentially unchanged and even Cinti's voice is not too dissimilar from that phonically inimitable voice of the Sicilian musician.
There's no perception of unnecessary executional pretense from the ensemble, which instead seems to work by subtraction and refinement, re-elaborating the original wavering atmospheres with remarkable clarity, effortlessly reaching that immaterial "Permanent Center of Gravity" positioned between the celestial mechanics towards which we are all attracted.
When placing the needle on the vinyl, one is almost disconcerted to hear a Battiato-record-without-Battiato - as the cover itself suggests - but that initial sense of bewilderment, as if we were alone on a deserted tropical beach, is soon replaced by the intact pleasure of listening, also thanks to the fact that the raw material used is, today as back then, of the highest level.
In short, I have the feeling that Franco might consider himself satisfied with this his sentimentally new old album, considering that abundantly perceivable are copious, pulsating, magnetic "Signals of Life" in the houses at dusk of a caliber anything but negligible.
Tracklist
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