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Rating:
When one is "Against Themselves" (and writes a song about it) they demand utmost respect.
Especially in an era where the most practiced monotheistic religions are selfishness, egocentrism, and a complete lack of self-criticism.
Especially when someone like Morgan asserts it, on whom anyone would bet their life on his utter lack of modesty.
But Morgan is the putative son of Douglas Hoftstadter (who even created a beautiful ambigram for him) and the nephew of Epimenides.
His love for different levels of meaning is, these days, second only to that for his daughter Anna Lou.
(Self)contradiction is his daily bread.
Like when, a few years ago, he publicly and arrogantly criticized the "classical experiment" (Fleurs) of his mentor Battiato.
Only to famously emulate it a few years later with "Canzoni Dell'Appartamento" and (especially) the reinterpretation of "Non al Denaro, nè all'Amore, nè al Cielo" by De André.
In Morgan, the boundary between art and life, fiction and falsehood, is (or at least he wants it to appear) thin, like the boundary of a fractal set, like the (nonexistent) boundary between Truth and Falsehood.
The music, although sometimes extremely successful and magnificently crafted (as in "Una Storia d'Amore e Vanità" or the title-track), is an accompaniment to this "philosophical" mental status.
Is this album fully successful?
I don't know.
I read on the web that when he submitted it to his former record label, they called it "difficult and not new".
In the end, maybe it's a bit like that because there's a lot of sixties singer-songwriter style ("Demoni nella Notte", "La Verità", the same "Amore Assurdo") that isn't new (Capossela has already revisited it abundantly) and, at least to me personally, it feels heavy (and therefore difficult) to listen to.
But there are also the Dadaist "Animali Familiari", "U-Blue", "Da A ad A" which, for some reason, when I listen to them, give me the impression of being on a "drunken" ship, and then I discover that Morgan himself composed it thinking of such a situation (source: web).
And then there's (sung in English along with Aria) "Liebestod" (a mystical marriage between Berlin Bowie and the Gainsbourg of "Je t'aime").
Now, since everything else I could say might bore you, and therefore be "Against Myself", I'll stop here.
Until my next notes, "in 5 min" or a month, who knows (I don't write my "reviews" as quickly as Morgan makes songs).
Tracklist and Videos
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