Offlaga Disco Pax
Bachelite

LA RECENSIONE

Italy discovers itself anew yet old, bipolar and Berlusconi-like, with the Lega at 7% in Emilia-Romagna and the left with no seats in Parliament: "they really took everything from us" and so there is no better moment for Bakelite, the new album by Offlaga Disco Pax, whose stories, variously set across the last thirty years, intercept the mutation of an Emilia province that gradually increases its paranoia. The sonic environment supporting the stories is an at times dark, at times dreamy indietronica, unabashedly citing its references (from Neu! in "Where Did I Put the Golf?" to the electronic handclapping of Joy Division’s "Decades", marking the climax in "Twenty Minutes") and revisiting in this album the musical places now typical of the band's poetics ("Superchiome" recalls the bossa-wave of "Kappler", while "Onomastica" renews the game of name listing, similarly to "Robespierre"). The thematic guide of the tracks is - according to the group's own definition - a low-intensity ideology, made of icons full of irreparably pop political substance - from Yashchenko, Soviet high jumper, "ventral!", record holder in the face of American Fosbury floppers, to the loser Lula, celebrated by the sticker on the Golf that the singer reclaims in "Where Did I Put the Golf?" (a sui generis "proletarian expropriation" that will go unnoticed by the authorities as much as Lula's near victory in the Brazilian election campaign of '94, before becoming the "a bit watered down" leader of today), passing through the chirocephalus, a strange and ancient shrimp, whose "epic" becomes in "Fermo!" a metaphor for the fight against mainstream thinking. The promises made by history are not kept - so Mambro can go around describing her life companion Giusva Fioravanti as sensitive and can do so freely, in life as in vocabulary; likewise, the passing of years destroys certainties, confuses roles - the sound engineer who was "sound engineering" in "Farsightedness" will become a well-known singer-songwriter, while in the background the ARCI transforms from a "grassroots" organization into what we all know the ARCI to be now - and it strikes someone who probably doesn't deserve it - the toxic girl in "Chocolate I.A.C.P", (and now we know why, the Toblerone).

Bakelite confirms Offlaga as one of the few plausible hypotheses of Italian "sensitive pop": surely, the indie audience will once again memorize the lyrics and give proverbial substance to the most incisive slogans. After all, isn't that what happened to CCCP too? If only Tondelli were still with us - it hurts, instead, to acknowledge that, at the moment, someone else is the one who came out of the Eighties alive...