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Rating:
"lacks analysis and then I don't have the helmet"
Rock n' roll as a Dionysian rite, as a projection of the irrational, as an orgiastic experience.
Rock n' roll as an invasive and virulent disease, like an infection as intense as it is brief.
A mid-July performance, on a beach, for a group boasting a live album with the programmatic title of "17 Cumshots".
A "power trio", three shady Americans from the Deep South, so brotherly that they adopt the same surname, steeped in the noxious vapors that rise from the malarial swamps from whence they come, with a fixation on sex and chaos.
Beneath the stage, a frenzy freed from the hooks of daily life, on the beach blooming nymphets in shorts and bare feet are chased by young fauns and, further away, groups and scattered individuals, in states of free-falling consciousness.
The reality, much more prosaic, passes through beach 72 of Marina di Ravenna, better known as "Hana Bi" (not far from the infamous and now declining "Duna degli Orsi"), amidst the fumes of barbecues and piadinas with an audience engaged in performing the usual showcase, each according to their own market niche.
And then a whole sparkle of flashes and eyes behind the video cameras. This way, the spectator "is there but not really there." They are physically present, yet paradoxically never see the performance firsthand, always only mediated by the video, first on the camera display and then through the (ex)catodic eye. The power of modernity.
A quick session of songs, for an hour or a little more, including the canonical encores, requested in a far-from-insistent manner by the above-mentioned polite audience. A ragged group in front of the stage mimicking, with little appeal, inappropriate dances, and some attempt at pogo during the faster songs completed the picture.
I have already written on other occasions that, for an audience that conceives the only possible reality as a replication of what "should be," simulation is the only sincere behavior and the only possible attitude.
Simulated, therefore true.
No surprises, no life spoiling the events.
The Oblivians, as we were saying.
A kind of carbonara of rock n' roll: A well-known recipe that, when executed with skill, never disappoints; there would be dozens of reference names, all of quality. Just to give a hint: Screaming Jay Hawkins, Ramones, Gun Club... however, treated with a fury that dragged the Oblivians towards the infernal circles of rock with nothing to lose.
However, being rigorous, the points of contact between blues and punk are not as numerous and obvious as it might seem at first glance, and this is why the hybrids built on this alchemy do not always work properly. But when they work, when these "parallel convergences" are realized, then the result reeks of sulfur and stale beer. And the Oblivians were more or less this.
But time passes, mothers turn grey, and, like in tin toys, the wind-up spring wears out and loses vigor.
Expectations had to be downsized, and indeed the three figures certainly did not propose the incendiary bombs we listened to in the "Sympathy Sessions," but an honest concert, at times vigorous and loaded albeit with perhaps a slightly too clean sound (always if compared to the sandpaper of the beginnings). A performance by authentic craftsmen who know well what needs to be done on stage, but for this not to be belittled a priori.
Finally, let's not forget that in these cases, ropes and ties imposed by ordinances and various bans also row against, which, in addition to causing psychotic states and breathalyzer syndrome, prescribe sound limits from Zecchino d'Oro and total curfew at the stroke of midnight.
Is it for this reason that the cart we were traveling in was turning into a pumpkin - and we into donkeys?
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