Litfiba
Mondi Sommersi

THE REVIEW

I was young, I didn't have a CD player, and to listen to music I used the legendary cassettes. I would spend hours glued to the radio waiting for them to play my songs so I could record them. Kind of like downloading music from the Internet now. Some stations would illegally broadcast entire albums of popular artists from that time, and I would have fun creating my own tapes, recording, cutting sudden commercial breaks, etc... it often resulted in a mess, and I had to make do since my wallets weren't so full of money. Honestly, they're not even now.

I remember that period fondly, my first musical passions, perhaps debatable and naive but true. A friend of mine had lent me a pirated cassette of Litfiba, “Mondi Sommersi.” After school, I duplicated it, and even though the audio was lousy and poor, I started to like the band, and that little cassette didn’t leave the player for a few years, along with various Ligabue and 883. The collection of cassettes (rarely original) was growing, and with them also the care towards them. Well, “Mondi Sommersi” had a place of honor.

Almost 10 years after those first listens, the cassette is still alive, well, and dusty in some corner of my room. We have two versions of "Ritmo": at the start, with its dark, throbbing, and distorted advance, and midway through the album, named "Ritmo#2," which was released as a single, particularly "rhythmic," commercial, but original and powerful teetering between rock and electronic. It's as interesting as the stoogesian "Apri le tue porte" and "Dottor M."—this one really strong! The lyrics, in general, are "simple and somewhat trivial," paraphrasing Afterhours, much less committed than those of Spirito or even more than the protest "Terremoto," but thanks to the music they flow away and are easy to listen to. We have lows and horrors like the incomprehensible “L’esercito delle forchette” (what the hell is it about?) and “In fondo alla boccia” (meh!). “Regina di Cuori,” never much tolerated, “Goccia a Goccia,” and “Sparami” were the hits that took the album to the top of the charts. The latter certainly represents the band’s last masterpiece (together with the subsequent "Vivere il mio tempo"), with its gloomy atmosphere with a Pelù in a state of grace, delivering memorable verses like: “scusami ogni sistema è una gabbia, mi da rabbia, perché aumenta le differenze, fra chi ha potere e chi non ha proprio niente” and the only one in an unfortunately commercial album, not because it sold so much, but because it tried to win the audience's favor with that adjective that makes everything so fashionable or cool that newspapers and magazines often give so easily: alternative.

Litfiba was part of the alternative rock in the ‘80s and perhaps even in the ‘90s (only for Terremoto, the last gasp of a rebellious band against a country in crisis). They were part of my adolescence, and I don’t regret it. This cassette, along with many others, served me, for better or worse, to begin a journey from the bottom, towards the streets, the highs and lows, of music, the one with a capital M.