Franco Battiato
Shock In My Town

There are artists who struggle to say something new or, at least, original for entire careers. Battiato, however, is someone who can surprise even with a single: Shock In My Town is one of those songs that stands alone, a stone thrown into the pond of pop music, a precedent with which everyone has to contend, even Battiato himself, who has returned to the scene of the crime several times (Running Against The Grain, Between Sex and Chastity).

The depth of philosophical thought combined with musical experimentation. An alchemy that has made the pair Sgalambro-Battiato one of the consoling features of the Italian musical landscape, otherwise overly indebted to Anglophone music. And Battiato plays on this: shock in my town velvet underground, I have heard screams of fury from generations, no longer with a past, of neo-primitives. Although Battiato and Sgalambro have almost always used other languages appropriately, this time the English seems like a joke, a simple chant, a few words used just for their musicality. Instead, it is the Italian that stands out, with its syncopated rhythm and the power of the word, although hermetic and less musical.

The journey becomes even more precise in the previously unreleased track of this single, Stage Door, a song that remains in demo version, whose musical incompleteness serves as a counterbalance to a text that is intense and magnificently written, among the best ever recorded by Battiato. It is a philosophical digression on life's attitude, where the more melancholic aspects (if you only knew the pain of an existence that sees black where there is none) alternate with moments of hysteria (because we are free to do what we want, to kill, rape, and rob) and others of resigned serenity (but I wish I were an eagle, seeing the plane of the world tilt towards us).
To embellish the single, La Cura and La Stagione dell'Amore follow, in live version. The first is a fairly ordinary episode that adds nothing to the album version. The second is instead a successful reinterpretation of one of his most beautiful songs, this time accompanied in singing by the splendid Nicola W. Smith, strangely shelved by Battiato in the following years, who preferred significantly less talented female voices to her. Smith performs some parts of the original song translated into English, the interplay with the verses sung in Italian by Battiato is splendid and matches, without declining, what has already been heard in Strange Days.

If it is necessary to cite an essential single from Battiato’s career, Shock In My Town is certainly a candidate. And if it is possible to give dignity to an almost exclusively commercial operation like the launch of a single, in this case, they have completely succeeded.