Mace
OBE

Who is Mace, this eccentric man with long hair, partly green and partly red? He is a producer and disc jockey who, in recent years, has produced some of the biggest hits of Italian hip-hop, from "Pamplona" by Fabri Fibra to "Chic" by Izi, from "Ho paura di uscire 2" by Salmo to the album "DNA" by Ghali. I know, it’s not an impressive resume. He became famous in the early 2000s as a producer for Jack the Smoker, collaborated with someone named Sjava, with whom he created an afrobeat track that climbed to the top of the South African charts, and worked on official remixes for Fatboy Slim and others under the electronic collective RESET!. But let's get to the point: OBE (acronym for Out of Body Experience, sounds a bit pretentious, doesn’t it?) is released on February 5 of this unfortunate 2021 and soon each track finds its way into the top 50 of the peninsula. Who participates? Most of the big names on the Italian trap scene and beyond, and here the majority of you will rightly wrinkle your noses. Could a valid album come out with these premises? Maybe. Did a valid album come out? Well, no. Almost all the productions are incredible, the tiny problem is who sings over them. Because that’s the problem with Italian hip-hop: the beats are simply used to mark a rhythm on which to shoot uninterrupted streams of words that make listening cumbersome and boring.

The dances are opened by a nice chorus from the aforementioned Venerus but everything is already ruined by Guè Pequeno, a consummate lyricist, who comes out with a couplet he has been following for a bit too long, "Whose fault is it?/We point fingers, I've always aimed at the clit." Next track, the second single released, is perhaps the best of the album, where newcomer Blanco breaks the mold and delivers a pop chorus that gives chills, while Salmo restores qualitative balance with a verse that could have been written by Fedez and with a flow that's been heard over and over again. The following tracks are one more boring and already-heard than the other, from a single by Gemitaiz who doesn't even try to innovate, to Venerus who continues to be good but his singing becomes just tiring, to Rkomi and Madame who perhaps make the other good track of the album, too bad for the prolixity combo. The rest of the tracks range from forgettable to horrible ("Top Boy" by Goelier, a name that guarantees it) to finally (!) "Hallucination," a nice instrumental track.

What a fatigue.