Lali Puna
Tridecoder

I write this review with my dear friend Francesco in mind, whose move to London has not distanced us in the least, and without whose support I would not have been able to write it.

It seems trivial, but the first step in considering a music product is to be able to listen to it, while the debut work of this group that marks such a divide in electronic production these years, seems to be as easily snubbed as, conversely, it is easy to talk and write about the music of Lali Puna as a whole; it can't be found through peer to peer, it can't be found in the secondhand market, no one lends it to you (unless you take a little trip to London), thus it's bypassed altogether. Furthermore, why struggle for a work from '99 when you can easily find the following ones?
In fact, Tricoder constitutes a milestone in its genre, and its contribution may reveal itself better precisely years after its release.
The content is that same sound characterizing all of Lali Puna's production, this is true, with strengths in the brilliance of electronic sounds, the balance between measure and energy of the rhythm base, and that female voice that with its beauty and perfect execution, captures the attention and fascinates the listener who lets themselves be accompanied (attention: not "cradled", "accompanied").
The sounds are sparse, never redundant or tiring, but at the cost of appearing even drier, or sharper, than in the subsequent "Scary World Theory". I take the latter as a reference because in my opinion, here we find the pinnacle of balance, a reference not only for the work that precedes it but for the entire electronic music scene of these years! Obviously, the result is slightly inferior, although overall, the album never becomes tiresome.
The melody is penalized, and to find the thread, one must resort to a cerebral listening that tends to select the potential listeners (the synthetic strings in "Fast Forward" seem to suggest this path, perhaps offending those who do not want suggestions and leaving untouched those who cannot grasp them, but so be it :-)
The voice always appears in orthogonal spaces: it is clean, orderly, "hard"; so distinct that it seems almost to compete with the electronic sounds (only to then beat them). Yet in some moments (rare), it catches one off guard and, expressing itself with sweetness, prevents us from being almost scared away by so much coldness.

Overall, it is an immature album and also an album in the strict sense of the term, a collection of self-contained pieces, and thus it is also lacking in that homogeneity that can help a so-so product and make it seem better. However, I do not think one can consider it simply a good debut because we are faced with a finely crafted album, immensely rich in all the maturity that the artists, converging in Lali Puna, have brought with them: commendable on a technical level, each track reveals an originality now sadly rare (thus precious). In this sense, I would be ready to assert that all the subsequent work of the group up to today is contained in these tracks.
In a retrospective analysis that reviewing the old work of a group at the moment of their greatest commercial success allows us, I dare to say that it is as if the three albums adhere, in chronological order, to the core of their music with the first, the cream of their potential with the creativity and homogeneity of the second, the extremization of their peculiar characteristics with the third (in my opinion the worst as an album, but with 4 excellent tracks, perhaps two outstanding ones).
In this sense, I was not impressed by "6-0-3", the first and certainly the most publicized among the tracks on the album, precisely because I acknowledge having been spoiled by the subsequent production that I believe has sufficiently dissected and surpassed it. I find "Antena Trash" commendable, which instead seems to have been complemented rather than surpassed by the better tracks from "Faking the Books" (in this sense it reinforces my belief of a junction in production between the first and third with "Scary World Theory" as an exclusive peak in a moment of very happy creativity) and I invite you to listen to the last two tracks, only instrumental, which if included despite the absence of Valerie's voice, must mean something.