I Cani
Post Mortem

About two hours ago, the fourth album by Cani was released as a surprise. Now that it's been 9 years since the last album, during which Italian university pop has become the sovereign power tool we all know while the meme pages on Contessa's fourth album have been sucked into the same quicksand that took away the entire editorial staff of Vice Italia, we are ready to admit that of that privileged period when being jerks and having a cool Facebook wall paid off, there's nothing left, truly nothing at all.

The first album was important more sociologically than musically, precisely because it was shitty pop made with shitty keyboards talking about truly existing shitty people – neo-fascist types from Parioli with a passion for Dan Deacon and blades, who lived their adolescence in Rome's north square with the aesthetic sense of a Williamsburg hipster. The narrator spoke like a crazy resentful person, with the usual complex of the left-wing bourgeois who hates himself but amplified to dinosaur levels. At least as long as the melodies and proto-incel violence pushed, the formula held.
From the second album, the decline began: the songs of Cani from 2013 to today have moved on the long wave of a deep post-coital depression, him thinking he was intelligent because he sings about theoretical physics and in interviews wears a No Age t-shirt, sagacious because he produced Coez and knew that Bastonate had a column called dsichi, and it goes without saying that his lyrics have been a concentration of the depressed thirty-something cliché who listens to Matteo Bordone's podcast (whose voice also appears in "2033," an old ghost track).

Contessa, I'm not mad at you, I know you're reading this because you're refreshing Google since this morning to scour every corner of the net and see what people think of your album. I'm. Not. Mad. At. You. It's just that someone needs to tell you that this little game has lasted long enough, that now you'll get the props from Giuse The Lizia or some other MiAmi scene supernova already on the way to oblivion, and that you can't flirt around like you're the new Cremonini when, as you don't forget to mention, at twenty-five you read Infinite Jest in English, and what the hell did you need to read it in English for, maybe just to flex it in an interview to the defunct XL? There you go, Nicolò, you are that period, get it? We're in 2025 and you're still teasing the liberal audience? Are you really still reading Ben Lerner's novels?

I'll do something very Il Pratese Hipster, an old gag for old people like us who remember when you deleted the post of your Max Pezzali cover due to the shitstorm you received in the comments—ah, dear 2013, how I miss your putting everyone in their place, in your own way, in these years of broad agreements. I'll review the new album without having listened to it, partly because I care about Nicolò and partly because I missed him, but mainly because he's been choosing titles with the logic of the predictable nerd for fifteen years: in "Nabokov" you used a high-sounding name to talk about Nabokov her, that is, his wife; in "Introduzione" you chose a catchy title for a verbose agglomeration of mental masturbation; in all of "Aurora," you talked about galaxies to talk about chicks. By now, I've developed antibodies. Here is mine, therefore.

1 - io: excellent minor key piano ballad complete with a string interlude, where he basically says he's fine with his new life as a father and couldn't care less about the left, moreover he mentions Fontaines DC and Elon Musk;
2 - buco nero: Auroriano track, cultured citations between Kraftwerk and Clams Casino;
3 - colpo di tosse: uses the aesthetic device of badly made pop to talk about how we're a cough away from extinction;
4 - davos: white funky vaguely rapped as it's fashionable now, the instrumental part is practically a Post Malone type beat, but with a melancholic subtext, note the line "and then we'll find ourselves like jerks in Davos/ in peace finally/ with money and fluoxetine";
5 - colpevole: this one doesn't convince me, it speaks in symbols, but it's clear it's all about washing his conscience for having created the wave of inoffensive indie pop of the last ten years;
6 - f.c.f.t - usual instrumental with drones to show off his knowledge;
7 - post mortem - another piece that shows he's up-to-date with the latest quantum innovations, on sweet digital keyboard chords he reflects on the concepts of white holes and that when we're "on the other side", well who knows, we might not stay there forever;
8- felice - usual passive-aggressive minor key song where the title is taken from the line "and who knows if I'll ever be happy like you?", where "you" is the daughter;
9 - nella parte del mondo in cui sono nato - first classic ballad of his career, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and a pessimistic and solemn text, like the Baustelle from Malavita;
10 - madre - this one also talks about the daughter, the mother is fleetingly mentioned;
11- carbone - synth-pop song that compares the decline of Western society to the fossil fuel cycle;
12 - buio - piano and voice piece in which Contessa reiterates his and my greatest fear: what awaits us after?;
13 - un'altra onda - 8 minutes gallop for the grand finale, Latin-funk echoes, prog rhythm changes, brass interventions, "the other wave" is clearly the one that will wipe us forever from the face of the earth, so the whole piece is a sarcastic danse macabre on the oblivion that awaits us.