Mauro Pelosi
La stagione per morire

What if I told you that I spent two whole days defecating on the television, on my favorite Mexican guitar, aiming from the top of the kitchen chandelier, on the bed, rolling between the sheets, on the nightstand and the cordless phone, then recovering some of the proceeds and spreading them on the terrace window - not before hurling a good dose at the mustachioed passers-by in their Sunday best, unsuspecting of my inventively filthy-splatter creativity - closing this epic escalation by wiping my butt with the satin curtains of my cozy English-style living room? What would you think? Eh? Eh? Probably that I'm a fool, and who could blame you?

Pelosi. Let's see... Some dinosaur or fossil from the site might only remember "Ho fatto la cacca" - perhaps its characteristic final prog crescendo, or possibly solely its school-like (and decidedly incisive) title, or maybe not even that -, what might initially appear as an eccentric provocation from the marvelous world of Italian trash ; what is quite likely his most known song, or, at least, the one that didn't go entirely unnoticed - and who knows why, eh? Italians...
But Mauro Pelosi was much more, and above all, the pseudo-nonsense emerging from the rant contained therein conceals a much deeper meaning. But "Ho fatto la cacca" is another story...

Having let the opportunity slip by to grab the rare "La stagione per morire" in CD format - additionally losing like a decent fool (good nickname doesn't lie...) during an ebay auction held some time ago -, now skeptical towards the untrustworthy sellers of my shitty city, I tried to redeem myself by relying on the sewer excavations in the depths of the internet.
Luck had it that I found it again on some damn French site, where, knowing not a (1) word of it (excluding chatte, of course), the good blechnrolle skillfully maneuvered to rescue me, using his vast knowledge of the language [...] shortly after receiving my telepathic cry for help, in a Gemelli nel segno del delfino style (although I have neither a dolphin nor an emo tuft - which I wouldn't sport even if I didn't suffer from baldness).

In short, I'll keep it brief. Meanwhile, there's a fly on the monitor.

The Roman singer-songwriter's album, dated 1972 (the album, not the singer-songwriter), is a sort of concept album about twilight. Can you imagine?, a concept about twilight... what a thing! It's not true. It might be some kind of concept album about the twilight of a lonely man (?), about suicide, or maybe pessimism - pessimism that will accompany him until the concluding "Suicidio".
In short, definitely nothing happy. If you're highly sensitive during this period, it might be better to postpone listening. I'm not kidding; I've even come across the following comment regarding this album: «Mah! It may seem like a cliché, but listened to on a rainiest possible August day, with already some bad thoughts in mind, in the Italian province with the highest suicide rate, it really risks being an incitement to extreme acts.»

Roughly, it might be the story of this man who loses his partner, feels abandoned, realizes he has lost everything, and once enveloped by sadness and pessimism, takes stock of his existence and realizes (convinces?) himself that he is precisely what he has concluded in his life: absolutely nothing.
His perpetual defeat, his inability to get back up, his feeling of uselessness, and his anxiety then catapult him into a vicious circle that pushes him ever deeper into the abyss.

He will decide that the season to die is spring because only then can he savor the most beautiful thing: flowers in the fields. But this time, after waiting all year for spring to return, he realizes it's no longer the same; this time, «waking up every day, looking in the mirror, and discovering you’re just a reflection», just for those few flowers, is no longer worth it.
But he will go on. He will continue to wallow in his failures magnified by his mood, until he confesses to his friend ("Caro amico") that he lives the life of someone who is dead and that those flowers in the fields, though it is spring, are no more for him...

Okay, to be honest, I'm making this all up. It may not be a concept album, maybe just a best of sadness, a slap in the face to Joy Division's "Atmosphere". Maybe the concept is approached so genuinely that even Pelosi doesn't know he did it. I don't know, but "Vent'anni di galera" should be the hit of broken hearts.

In any case, decidedly dark lyrics and arrangements that, while not introducing anything extraordinary, using the right orchestrations, still convey the "right" doses of bitterness, a sense of suspension and disorientation to the themes addressed (sadness galore, someone might call it).

Pelosi's style is both carefree, as will later be celebrated by the more commercially fortunate Rino Gaetano ("Venderò"), and straightforward and theatrical, as Piero Ciampi was teaching ("La stagione per morire"); but the peculiarity that permeates his entire production is certainly that eerie melancholy to levels that could even make Leonard Cohen, agony personified as a singer-songwriter, appear as the portrait of happiness, a worldly jester ("E dire che a maggio").

Genre: dramatic