Ivan Graziani
Pigro

This wasn't supposed to be a review, but given the length and the amount of stuff, it was impossible to confine this writing to just one listen...and then today is Ivan's birthday.

After many years of apprenticeship and a masterpiece behind him called I lupi, Ivan decides to aim even higher: he calls upon the best musicians of the time and dramatically increases the budget for the recordings...and the result speaks for itself. Pigro is an extraordinary album, composed of 8 tracks that managed to bring one of the first breezes of rock to all Italian ears, with perfectly curated and always original sounds. The role of the Trojan horse goes to Monna Lisa, introduced by a mechanical and compelling riff that tells the story of a man who decides to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre to destroy it; in this track, all the artist's characteristics are present, an eccentric and lively text, powerful rock that explodes in the chorus to the sound of Monna Lisa.

After such a start, the album settles with the two main ballads: Sabbia del deserto, with a masterful horn arrangement, tells of an artist who (survives) lives in his small provincial town where he finds his girlfriend and his relatives constantly in trouble for him; the second is Paolina, a slightly Venditti-like portrayal of the daily struggles and sufferings of a girl who is the center of desire for certain men.

In the middle of the album, one of the most successful pieces of the songwriter's entire repertoire suddenly materializes, introduced by a powerful and aggressive guitar riff and a hard and precise drum tempo that immediately create an atmosphere of unease: this is Fango, a brutal story of a 21-year-old boy who commits a murder. The text is disarmingly beautiful, it feels like you're in front of the young murderer and the arrangement reaches one of the highest levels in Graziani's guitar field, giving strength and grit to the chorus, creating a sound enchantment between the brutal and the magical.

Delving into side B, there's a very particular track, namely the title track Pigro: built on an apparently simple and catchy acoustic guitar riff, it tells the bigoted way of thinking of certain bourgeois categories who read book after book but can't even understand the difference between a branch and a leaf; a small and delightful classic from Ivan's repertoire.

After Al festival slow folk di b-Milano, a mockery of the progressive groups of the time in a rock-folk sauce, another of the artist's best tracks arrives: Gabriele D'Annunzio, a title that is merely a decoy as it talks about a coarse and uncivilized peasant who has little to do with the poet; the arrangement is composed almost exclusively of the acoustic guitar, flavored in certain passages only by flutes. Ivan's greatness was precisely in this, managing to enchant and surprise even using simple and basic arrangements in the style of the singer-songwriting of the time.

This little work closes with another ballad called Scappo di casa: this time, it's the piano that supports a good part of the arrangement, spiced up with some acoustic guitar interludes. The piece talks about a boy who, tired of his mother's constant obsessive care, runs away from home, but finds himself in a world that is completely hostile to him, and at the end of his journey decides to return home; with Ivan's desperate humming, what is undoubtedly his most inspired and refined album concludes, reaching peaks of high rock that will be difficult to repeat in Italy.