Giardini di Mirò
Il Fuoco

Given that:

1. I can't stand Giardini di Mirò
2. They haven't invented anything
3. They're a bunch of damn sycophants

Having said all this, "Il Fuoco", I have to admit it, is a beautiful album.

Let's start from the origins of the project: it's the year 2006, and the National Museum of Cinema in Turin commissions Giardini to score the newly restored "Il Fuoco", a 1915 film, masterpiece of Italian silent cinema directed by Giovanni Pastrone and scripted with the collaboration of Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Last year, I had the chance to attend the performance "Giardini di Mirò VS Il Fuoco", where the band tried their hand at the improvised construction of a worthy soundtrack tracing the plot developments of the film, projected behind the band members who were shyly handling their instruments almost with embarrassment and reverence towards such a masterpiece film: a suggestive, intense spectacle where I found myself surprised to appreciate the executive qualities and expressive sensitivity of the Emilian band, which, to be honest, had never thrilled me before.

Today, in 2009, the album spawned from this experience finally sees the light: although the official release is scheduled for September, the work is already available by ordering it online or purchasing it at stands set up during live performances. Like it or not, I've attended no less than five Giardini concerts in my life, and during the band's latest visit to Tuscany, I didn't let this precious tome slip by me, which, like it or not, I had been chasing for about a year.

Because "Il Fuoco" is a beautiful album: because, first and foremost, Giardini return to their most congenial dimension, that of an inspired instrumental post-rock. I already celebrated the departure of Raina, never appreciated, later replaced at the microphone by the band members, another choice I did not find very fortunate: today Giardini instead take a step back, setting aside any desire to export their product to larger audiences, paradoxically publishing their most humble and at the same time ambitious album, certainly the most thoughtful, in my opinion their best ever.

A step back, because the idea of the massive post-rock crescendo (in which, it must be said, they are masters) is maturely downsized to the ranks of a more intimate dimension: a music, contained in "Il Fuoco", that plays skillfully and delicately with nuances, with contrasts, with the emotional flow of the notes, never too many, always well-measured and always positioned in the right place. A balance that is almost miraculous.

Twelve pieces come together and overlap in a single and coherent path, so much so that defining "Il Fuoco" a long and engaging 43-minute suite is not entirely out of place.

Taking a step back is primarily Francesco Donatello, who, shedding the role of powerful percussionist with a deadly beat, serves the project by gently accompanying the flow of notes with a bare and repetitive drumming (often it is the crashing of cymbals that gives direction to the tracks), but always functional to the whole of things. In contrast, heartfelt guitar arpeggios by Corrado Nuccini dominate, along with the timely violin and clarinet inserts by multi-instrumentalist Emanuele Reverberi. The rest is done by the fragile piano chimes, soft keyboards called to give greater body to the sound, the ethereal croons of Jukka (a vocal approach more "instrumental" than anything else), the never-invasive electronic embroidery recruited to soften the edges of a dreamy and intangible post-rock.

The suite traces the moods of the three phases of the film ("La Favilla", "La Vampa", and "La Cenere"), a bitter love story between a painter and a poetess, a tale where the fatal factors of passion and madness inevitably intervene. The Giardini, indeed, do not set up a simple soundtrack, but a work in its own right and independent from the film, so much so that watching the film is not indispensable for enjoying the album (as demonstrated by the fact that the original 55 minutes of the film are condensed into a reworked, shorter, and more compact form, a result, I imagine, of a careful operation of smoothing sounds, ideas, and arrangements).

As mentioned at the beginning, Giardini don't achieve any musical miracle, they don't invent anything new, so much so that the ghost of the unavoidable Mogwai continues to hover from the first to the last note of the work: it would be wrong, however, not to recognize Giardini's specificity within the genre, a fully defined personality, and a real inspiration in their approach to their sonic material—a music that can finally do without the soon-to-be and already decrepit clichés of post-rock.

The main theme of the work, gradually reprised throughout, is, for example, the most inspired thing the six musicians have ever conceived, a theme that manages to move even in its essential simplicity. The rest, as mentioned, is carried by the ever-inspired arpeggios of Nuccini, suspended, lost in a poetic world made of melancholy, romanticism, amorous ecstasy, disappointment, rage, despair, and madness.

In a couple of instances, however, the band recovers its compactness, architecting enticing crescendos, never over-the-top, always (like everything else, after all) functional to the moods of the ensemble.

As mentioned, Giardini are also sycophants (intelligent sycophants), and know well how to mix the innate catchiness of their music with more stylistically cultured passages, thus landing in minimal phrasing (between sophisticated electronics and free jazz streaks) and, in some instances, even in sheer noise. Perhaps precisely in the expressionist creaks of the instruments, and in the incongruous roar of the guitars, intertwined with the screeching of Reverberi's violin, we find the most mannerist moments of the work (as if, at the desk, Giardini had performed a balancing act, calling chaos to compensate for the mawkishness of certain passages, thus making their music impervious to the predictable temptations to label it as pop): moments, however, that we gladly forgive, given the light and beauty emanated by the whole.

This "Il Fuoco" is a finally mature album, a necessary album in the discography of Giardini, an album that elevates them and allows them to position themselves definitively in the pantheon of alternative Italian music of our days.

Warmly recommended to those easily moved.