No Guru
Milano Original Soundtrack

We last parted eleven years ago in the Bahamas, with the ocean sometimes asleep and with the fear of the new millennium's society, and here we find ourselves in the midst of a traffic-congested freeway celebrating this first decade of the new century amidst lights, shadows, and annoying noises, unreal morning silences, and illusory and tempting neon lights lit at the onset of evening darkness. It was worth the wait because this album, in one fell swoop, takes back the best rock music scene that plagued the boot in the nineties. What else to expect from four members of Ritmo Tribale (Scaglia, vocals and guitar, Briegel on bass, Marcheschi on drums, and Talia on keyboards) plus Xabier Iriondo, the guitarist of the early and unrivaled Afterhours, and with the presence of the crazy and unsettling sax of Bruno Romani, former member of Friuli's Detonazione. An ideal bridge between the old guard, with an eye on late seventies New York and early eighties new wave, and the new Italians advancing, Zu and Il Teatro degli Orrori come to mind.
It takes courage to reinvent oneself and get back in the game with new ideas, new sounds, and a new name, NO GURU, when your past is branded under an indelible moniker like Ritmo Tribale. They had already attempted with their last album Bahamas in 1999, to change coordinates, but if back then the sounds were liquid and fluid with strong electronic veins and progressive accents, this time one finds themselves enslaved and engulfed within a sound vortex of sharp guitars with the "germs" of Professor Xabier Iriondo spread throughout all the tracks, semi-industrial, sax noise wandering creating that hallucinatory chaos of six o'clock traffic jams on the west ring road in Milan.
Milano Original Soundtrack is born in a city that serves as the base for every single track, the beauty of living in it can become stress, paranoia, suffocation, with music as the great and only escape route.
Alienation born from looking at the past, at the mistakes made without knowing the tomorrow that awaits us in "Ieri è un altro giorno", a post-punk track placed at the opening just to frame the discourse.
Living today also means trying to deal with a feeling like love, "Amore mutuo", balancing the frenzy of everyday life with a feeling that, despite being constantly mentioned and brought into play, remains still too unknown, often risking losing opportunities (...Quanto devo e quanto do...Amore mutuo...La tua punizione ..C'è un buco nel mio polmone ...ma non si placa...) and even more often paying the price.
Obsession, tension, and urgency are palpable in "Non si passa" (Malattia mentale la sento che cresce e non lo faccio vedere temo la comunità della vita matrimoniale) and the hooks addressed to the darkest new wave of the eighties. The almost industrial "Cammino con le mani", surely a success in upcoming live shows and a symbol song of the No Guru project, the splendid cover of Complications by Killing Joke, for the occasion rewritten by Scaglia as "Complicato" and the citation of Joy Division in "Mare Divano", sax, guitars, and memories to kill, are certainly not accidental. Anguishes, sought and suffered. The first single Fuoco ai pescecani, accompanied by an original video, is a good pass that slowly penetrates the mind and the heart.
The "white" high favored by the metropolis Milan in the almost funk of "Neve(...a white spiral has entered my head and mixes everything into one big soup...)", the instrumental diversion of "Perle ai porci" that projects us into atmospheres dear to certain Italian b-movies of the seventies that would greatly appeal to Calibro 35.
And if "Il deserto degli dei(...ho una bomba nel cuore e i piedi sul ghiaccio...)" reminds me of the last Ritmo Tribale without Edda, the final "Bassa fedeltà" is a beautiful experiment that can be a candidate to be a beat song of the 2000s.
An album that does not like categorizations, that escapes in all directions but arrives where it intends to arrive, not easy, not commercial, but in the end, it also arrives with the difficulty of its uneven time changes, its almost jazzy digressions, its citations, its references, and its texts which are anything but predictable and trivial.
After Edda last year and No Guru this year, the tribal family has reunited and has demonstrated the strength that the old guard can still unleash. The lion, at the end of the album, can continue to roar, proudly.