Franco Battiato
La Cura

THE REVIEW

Fresh from the success of his first (and for some, unfortunately not last) Fleurs, Battiato, or rather the record label, to maintain attention between one album of unreleased tracks and another, releases "La Cura", a collection of 19 tracks that takes its title from the recent successful single by our artist, dating back to 4 years earlier. With this song, Battiato returned to a level of public success comparable only to that of 15 years earlier with "La Voce del Padrone".

And it is precisely the 1996 track that opens the lineup of this anthology, which is not arranged in chronological order and is also dedicated only to certain phases of the Sicilian artist's career. The major successes from the period 1979-1983 are presented, in the case of 1982 and 1983 "live", further characterizing the work, the recent successes from the albums "L'imboscata" and "Gommalacca", and particular attention is paid to "Fleurs", with as many as four tracks included. The intention, therefore, is more to keep the focus on the artist rather than to equitably summarize his career. Indeed, the songs from the 1985-1995 phase, ten years of extraordinarily significant career, as well as his entire experimental career from 1971 to 1978, are totally ignored. If the latter is justifiable, the former certainly is not.

Nonetheless, the album is thoroughly enjoyable in its 76 minutes, and there are hardly any weak episodes, except perhaps at the end of the album where too much space is given to the covers. There is a clever juxtaposition of tracks from the "old" Battiato, such as "Bandiera bianca" and "Sentimento nuevo", with tracks from the "new", like "Strani giorni", "Vite parallele" and "Shock in my town", thereby highlighting an artistic continuity. The cover does the rest, appearing vaguely "introspective", as the collection to be released at the end of the following year will be called, and which more than this will represent a compendium of his career. Therefore, this album is recommended not only to those who want to discover the Artist, but also to those who already know him and want to have, in one go, the most "direct" and "easy" tracks, where the quotation marks are absolutely necessary, for one of the most original and eclectic songwriters not only of the Italian music scene.