Museo Rosenbach
Barbarica

No, this time there is no duce on the cover, but just a painting with a "tribal" flavor in the foreground, set against a sunset background. The themes, however, are perhaps even more harsh and mature than their "masterpiece" work, one of the Italian Progressive dime pieces, initially relegated to oblivion due to a cover that, at the time, caused considerable controversy.

We are talking about Museo Rosenbach, who, in 1973, released an album capable of withstanding the test of time despite the RAI boycott: Zarathustra (1973, Dischi Ricordi) touched concepts that were difficult to perceive in the musical field at the time, including Nietzsche's Übermensch and the relationship between man and nature. A thematically difficult album but musically fascinating, performed with skill and great inspiration. However, the presence of Mussolini on the cover, unfortunately for the Museo, proved to be a lethal weapon: in fact, the album was poorly advertised precisely because of that cover, and the band disbanded within a few years; the advent of the internet, however, brought this gem back to light, prompting the band to resume their work at the dawn of the new millennium. In 2000, the band released Exit (2000, Carisch), featuring historical members Alberto Moreno on bass and Giancarlo Golzi on drums, accompanied by new musicians, and most notably, a new voice.

The band's original vocalist, Stefano Galifi (nicknamed Lupo), had pursued new paths, releasing an album in Zarathustra style in 2010 with Il Tempio delle Clessidre, which was actually also the name of one of the sub-tracks of the historical album's suite. But that very year, Golzi and Moreno called back their old companion to play an album in perfect Zarathustra style: "Lupo" accepted, and the "Museo" project returned in full force. Although many might think of it as merely a nostalgic operation, the intentions of the three members of the original formation turned out to be quite different: to resume the path abruptly interrupted by misfortune and censorship. With new members joining the historical ones, in 2012 the Museo released a "reissue" of Zarathustra, followed by an album consisting of both new material and pieces composed earlier, re-proposed with Galifi on vocals.

Barbarica (2013, Immaginifica) resumes the musical style of Zarathustra in a perhaps less inspired and organic manner, but the result is still of excellent quality: the album is well played, and the lyrics, even if they partly give the impression of being saturated with perhaps excessive rhetoric, exude poetry from every pore, with never trivial themes. Although the work consists of 5 pieces musically separated from each other, structurally it is clearly a concept, where current and impactful themes are presented to listeners: the difficult relationship of man with nature, his barbaric instinct that destroys everything he has built and makes him regress to a primordial state, a destructive fog where a glimpse of light, a spark of hope can be seen, which can only shine in the skies with a change, with the transformation of a collective consciousness now contaminated by hatred, envy, and destruction. In the initial suite, Il respiro del pianeta, man looks for this spark of hope in nature, which, although suffocated over the centuries by progress, responds with its love and warmth, showing us the way to an unspoiled face of the planet in which to take refuge. The other tracks present decidedly harsher and more pessimistic scenarios, symptomatic exposition of a crisis, according to the Museo, also spiritual.

Musically, Zarathustra was perhaps more inspired and certainly more in line with the musical trend of the time, but Barbarica remains an excellent work, perhaps too cloying but technically well executed and thematically very inspired.