Le Orme
Sera

LA RECENSIONE

The year 1975 is a strange one for Le Orme, acting as a kind of watershed between their progressive period and pop period (classy, of course): it's the year of Smogmagica, an album unique in being so many things—pop, progressive, hard-rock, singer-songwriter, and so on. It's the year they become four, with Tolo Marton joining on guitars (he leaves almost immediately and is replaced by the good Germano Serafin, this happens between '75 and '76). It's the year they go to record in Los Angeles, and the year of many other things.

Until then, they had engaged in a very complex and intricate type of music, but now for Le Orme, it's time to change and simplify the compositional aspect a bit: indeed, thinking about it, it's pointless to continue building scaffolding that might collapse at any moment; as Tony Pagliuca explains in an interview, the instrumentation and complexity of the songs in Contrappunti (1974) had reached their peak, a change of direction after all this is almost physiological.

The 45 RPM born of this new approach to music opens with "Sera": the harpsichord intro in 5/4 has a vaguely Genesis-like flavor due to the major chord sequence with the static bass always holding the first note of the sequence. In a moment, sharp blows of drums and bass, like punches, introduce the 'harsh' verse "Every day the certainty of a door slammed in my face, my futile fight against a sinking world, But there's something about to change, I feel it in the air, I find it again in the dying sun"—an incredible difference between the harsh, denunciatory text of the verse and the evocative tranquility of the refrain.

"The greatness of the evening
takes refuge in my memory
everything comes alive
and begins to resemble you again"

It is a track that creates a twilight atmosphere, almost slightly tense, with an excellent text as usual, and a meticulous and tinkling musical backdrop, surely a precursor to what would soon be called new wave.

The B-side of the single contains "India", a fascinating and evocative song from the famous album Contrappunti, with a hypnotic instrumental section and a text that describes, with poetry never just for its own sake, India, according to Le Orme.

As usual, the choice of very original sounds and never overly lush arrangements make "Sera" one of Le Orme's pop gems, after which they decided to devote themselves to composing simple 'songs', achieving excellent results with very few minor slips.