Lucio Battisti
Il nostro caro angelo

Great cover, too bad the album isn't as much.

"Il nostro caro angelo", dated 1973, is perhaps one of the greatest disappointments that Battisti will inflict on his fans. After the enormous success of "Umanamente uomo: il sogno" Lucio decided to radically change his musical demands. He abolished the classical music styles of "I giardini di marzo" and resorted to a perhaps slightly overused use of brass and guitars. The melodies settle on more regular but at the same time more monotonous notes, and the voice, always robust and powerful, seems to become weak and faint almost to the point of being unlistenable.

"Il nostro caro angelo" is an innovative album, full of brilliant musical ideas, unfortunately, however, full of experimental extremisms, sometimes weak and inconclusive. The research on sounds becomes more accurate and the album is mixed in London. Battisti becomes a supervisor and Mogol a friend to lean on in moments of low creativity and low ingenuity. The album, slightly patched together, is somehow held together by the theme of the earth and distant peoples (themes certainly expressed much better in the subsequent album, "Anima latina"). Considerable space is given to the theme of society, nature, the seasons, and fake bourgeois progress (themes, it must be said, are a bit spurious given that they are extolled by two ultra-millionaires named Mogol and Battisti).
Yet, despite visible errors and equally visible lapses in style, "Il nostro caro angelo" is not a despicable album. Here and there, some songs seem to recall the glories of good old times and the frequent jabs at consumerism and advertising in "Ma è un canto brasileiro" are amusing and elaborate ("I don't want to see you anymore dear while you sip a bitter orange drink with the ecstatic expression of someone who has achieved a purpose in life").
Musically complex is the interesting "La collina dei ciliegi", which, however, surprise surprise, raised doubts and controversies ("Gliding toward woods of outstretched arms"), no one ever forgave Mogol the clear fascist (almost Nazi) allusion that Rapetti wanted to include in the song. "La collina dei ciliegi" is a very complex piece, composed of crazy choirs and guitars, overlaps, daring and original stanzas, deliberately off-kilter metrics, and outrageously exaggerated rhymes. The same goes for "Il nostro caro angelo" in which, despite various gambles and originality, Battisti tries to imprint a more harmonious and tested melody, although the long finale seems to open up to melodic solutions still far from coming.
If we exclude the beautiful interlude of "Questo inferno rosa" (six minutes of poetry and sweetness), it is Side B that is the weak point of this album. "Le allettanti promesse", "Io gli ho detto di no", and "Prendi fra le mani la testa" are not songs worthy of the best Battisti: the music is catchy but not perfect, the words seem to want to say the same identical things over and over, the arrangements appear refined and overly elaborate. A (very strange) slip that Battisti seems unwilling to fix: the music becomes more intense, undeniably harmonious, yet lacks the solidity and elegance that had made "Umanamente uomo: il sogno" a masterpiece.

This time, "Il nostro caro angelo" did not manage to take flight completely.