Le luci della centrale elettrica
Terra

Who is Vasco Brondi?

In my very humble opinion, he is the one who, with "Canzoni da spiaggia deturpata" in 2008, initiated what we can consider the new Italian songwriting, often criticized and ignored, buried under the illusory veil of talent shows, but today present and alive.

Brondi uncorked, removed the plug that was holding back a generation of artists who, without the masochistic need to compare themselves with the songwriting of the 60s-70s, have something to say, with their language and their keys to decipher the reality/fiction of these blessed zero years.

Vasco Brondi gave dignity to this group of artists, allowing them to position themselves on that thin line between mainstream and underground. With a hyperbole, I could say that if today Calcutta is played on so-called mainstream radios, it's partly thanks to the less famous Vasco in our musical landscape.

The Ferrara singer-songwriter, then, as a precursor, is also capable, nearly a decade after his debut, of remaining distinctive and always recognizable among his peers. A distinguishable voice faithful to himself and his line, paraphrasing Giovanni Lindo Ferretti.

Le Luci Della Centrale Elettrica (this is the baptism of the Brondian project) saw the light at the end of the first decade of 2000 and came like a summer storm, and I, in my late adolescence with headphones in my ears, stopped and simply thought: where did this come from???

Soon afterward, fame, success, labels, criticism (the Moccia of the deranged), the Tenco award, the Mucchio Selvaggio prize, parodies and phrase generators, contaminations and collaborations (Canali and Dragogna of the Ministers), tours and the tour with Jovanotti on which I prudently suspend judgment, in short, all the elements that built brick by brick that artistic maturity which the small slip of Costellazioni (2013) will defer to March 2017 with the publication of Terra.

Here comes the usual list of artists who influenced Our Vasco: Battiato, Canali, CCCP, CSI then PGR, but why not Rino Gaetano and the unavoidable Fabrizio De André; we care little, and I believe that comparisons are rarely healthy, so let's go straight into the "small world" of Brondi, aimed with our feet on his Terra which, in his own words, will be "an ethnic album but of an imaginary (or rather "new") ethnicity which is the current Italian one. Where Balkan music and African drums coexist, Arabic melodies and Italian folk melodies, distortions, and religious songs, stories of escaping and returning."

And so be it.

The album is co-produced with Federico Dragogna of the Ministers, whom we also find as a musician.

Terra is Brondi's most ambitious album, leaving the province of Ferrara to embrace our whole planet called Earth, despite being largely made of water; water that is learned from thirst just as peace is learned from tales of battle, to quote some images inserted by the author in the texts of Terra.

And precisely around these images, evoked through the use of the cut-up compositional technique so dear to the Beat Generation prophet William S. Burroughs, which, however, sometimes in the past resembled more a nocturnal trip on Google made of copy-pasting over all human knowledge, the composition of the singer-songwriter is built; this time, however, the cut-up itself is less extreme and overused, just as the characteristic verbosity of previous works. The singing this time is better, much closer to the Italian pop tradition, the voice is more controlled, and the control itself replaces those hysterical explosions that characterized the "shouted" parts of Vasco's compositions.

As mentioned, the singer-songwriter leaves the province, integrating into his songs sounds and suggestions of so-called ethnic music, drawing between tribal and electronic music, with the intention of narrating our bizarre, multicultural, and varied Europe.

Let's start now a brief journey within some of the titles that compose the album's playlist.

The first track "A forma di fulmine" throws at us an endless series of possibilities in a perspective of openness towards the future, a future that, among all the possible ones, seems built on a desire to live that cannot disregard the revaluation of simple things, a future in which we have everything to win and nothing to defend.

Let's move to "Stelle marine." The stars represent the hands of a newborn child; the text sounds like a mantra centered on the oxymoron.

"Qui" begins with the call of the Muezzin from the minaret next to the mosque and continues with the description of some impossible realities.

We continue with "Viaggi disorganizzati," where the imprint of Franco Battiato's Summer On A Solitary Beach is evident, never denied as a reference point in Brondi's formation.

We now turn to what is probably the most traditional song in the entire production of Le Luci, Chakra, a sincere love song serenely resigned to the death of love itself.

Here is "Iperconnessi," which for the message it wants to convey, is one of the most interesting passages of the entire album; this piece intends to criticize the neuroses of social media and the irony found online, now defined as a social plague. A criticism of those who hide behind a keyboard risking alienation and those ready to justify everything in the name of progress, "Progress is fine, but how do you feel?"

The song ends with a call to reclaim the sacred right to secrecy, distance, and shyness now totally sacrificed on the altar of hysterical sharing and pathological exhibitionism.

We conclude this brief excursus with the metropolitan poetry of "Moscerini," in my opinion, the most intense moment of the entire work, an intimate and dreamy piece that merits describing with a few words entire scenes ranging from life to death and pushes the listener to go beyond, look beyond the horizon, and despite the building window opposite being 3 meters away, manage to see infinite horizons.

This is Terra for me. Every time I come across a listening of it, for me, it's like coming home, and beyond the aesthetic canons of each one, I believe it's worth dedicating some time to this album and to the knowledge of its author who, in my modest opinion, along with Francesco Bianconi of Baustelle, represents one of the best pens in our songwriting tradition.