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Rating: Music has always been a companion on our journeys. If once it was a cassette player embedded in the dashboard, now it is the latest technological advancements that gift us melodies that, pleasantly, marry with the art of movement... waiting... and returning.
Most often, music is a backdrop or an outlet; sometimes, only sometimes, it becomes the protagonist of its own journey. Such is the case with the album in question. This record has the power to make its listeners fly, to drag them to the edges of the Mediterranean and the Orient, to make them meet spoon carvers, drunken mariachi, and Tajikistani bars. Effortlessly, with a watchful yet dreamy gaze. If Corto Maltese needed a soundtrack, this record would fit him like a glove...
The first track, “Le Fonti,” is an invitation to immerse oneself in a different world, where the “clean sources” mentioned by the author are nothing but our history, our knowledge, and, why not, our pioneering songwriters who first showed us the way. The dance of “Carmelita” and her accordion lead us to the third track: “Il Demone del Tardi,” which, for this writer, stands as one of the album’s peaks, particularly for its absolutely controversial musical choice compared to the rest of the album, yet well reflecting the subversive charge of the protagonist’s recited verses: “...and the doctor tells me that monkeys so green he has never seen in the village’s dreams...”. Rather than a cure, self-analysis is more comforting for our madman who feels “only it is a beauty.”
The bitter love in “Un Destino Distante” resurfaces the theme of the journey and the traveler (“...and I, a traveling pain...”), which becomes weary without a hand that guides you along the way.
We are reinvigorated by the lights of the “Oriental Tajikistan Bar,” where we might stop for a meager trade and stop thinking about Her. And She, indeed, disappears. Obscured by the colors and lights of the Orient, North Africa, Our Mediterranean. She reappears, as if by magic, later, after journeys and mirages, tamed in a purposely simplistic song that is “Difficile l’Amore.” By now, the road has taught us to give things their due importance, to speak in proverbs, albeit caustic ones. On the fringe of these tracks is “Bianca,” another high point of the album, which combines dialect and Italian in a poignant ballad, where fog, a laburnum, snow, and nighthawks act as a backdrop to a tale of solitude and death in a Mantuan river. Almost Gucciniana in rendering so well the flow of water and life, remember “La Ballata degli Annegati”?
The album closes with other tracks of evident artistic stature that do nothing but reinforce an assessment that, from the first notes of the album, appears obvious to us: we hold in our hands a small sound jewel to be cherished with care. A “trap” that forces us to look toward the world’s beauty, pointing us to an unexpected route. Giving us yet another hypothesis of forgotten hope.
And let us be accompanied by this Virgil, for the dark forest will eventually end...
P.S. In the latest annuary of the Mucchio, the Assalti Frontali are also mentioned.
Of Maler’s album, which won a prize at the last Tenco, there is no trace.
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