Midwest
Town and country

Italian music makes me - truly - quite sick. I'm disgusted by their pathetic attempts to rise from the underbrush, to fight among themselves, their congenital hypocrisies, their attempts to curry favor with a - in itself miserable and vomit-inducing - press. I'm disgusted by their Italian rhymes (Italian is the language of Dante, not of Elvis: let this clarify the minds), I'm disgusted by their English pronunciations. I'm disgusted by the Italian musical tradition, mandolin and tagliatelle. I'm disgusted by the vision of the Italian singer-songwriter, I'm disgusted by the new noisy pathetic ranks. "You don't come out alive from the '80s," I read in one of the - few - Italian works that didn't disgust me. Rather - you don't come out alive from the Italian musical tradition. I'm a jerk - and what can be done about it, after all.

A soul gives me "this" Midwest album. I look at them, I have to say something. I know, alas, that the album hadn't disgusted me, since it had once already spun in the player. But, basking in my prejudice, I had immediately sent it back to the sender. This time, this time there's no possibility of sending it back, I put it in my pocket and think: "the first Italian album among a thousand, but I'll really shove it underneath, where it can't be seen."
I come home exhausted, with a thousand thoughts (sweet and bitter) assaulting me. I listen to it. "Harry the father" starts well, an instrumental without voice, and already I can't do anything with part of my prejudice. Now I remember that I liked it even then. I know, I'm a jerk, and in truth I tell you that I couldn't wait for the voice to arrive, and - when it comes - alas, it's a punch in the stomach: the perfect cross between Tom Barman's ruggedness (dEUS, Magnus) and Paul Anderson's sweetness (Tram). Then follows a deluge of acoustic guitars, banjo, piano caresses, light percussion, lamenting basses, organs, and accordion. I admit it: Italian music really disgusts me, but I have a weakness for accordions, I have a weakness for this damned poetic vision of folk, of country (ah! my heart aches). I have a weakness for Will Oldham, for Woody Guthrie, I have a weakness for Bob Dylan and Neil Young. I have a weakness for the fathers and also for the sons, who are called oRSo, Califone, The Bathers, The Good Life, The Zephyrs, Broken Dogs, Animal That Swim, Hem, St. Thomas, and company. I have a weakness for strangled voices, and I enjoy the suffering voices. So suffering that no reference exists: when a voice is like that, it becomes unique - in its own way.

This album is wonderful, and it won't end up under my pile of records, where I keep much worse junk. This album is wonderful. It's not it that's Italian; it's the other Italians who still insist on wanting to play.