Offlaga Disco Pax
Socialsimo Tascabile

Offlaga Disco Pax Pocket Socialism

“As a souvenir I took thirty packages of Tatranky wafers, packs like Loacker but much better. Only after a few days did I notice a slightly hidden brand: Danone. They really took everything from us. They really took everything” (Max Collini Tatranky)

They really took everything from us. They really took everything. What meaning can a song have? Well, it can have many: it can speak of love, despair, politics, death… 

Here is an album where many meanings intertwine and merge together, in a mix of residual pride, melancholy, and disillusionment.

The Offlaga Disco Pax are three guys in their thirties, from Cavriago in the province of Reggio Emilia, a city famous for being the last bastion of an ideal now gone, considered akin to an awkward relative: communism. In all these years since the end of the Soviet regime in Russia, many texts have been consumed, many chords have been broken in front of such an event, but no group had ever recounted with dignity and credibility the end of an era, the end of a dream as burdensome as this. At least until this album.

"Pocket Socialism" is a portrait full of flashbacks, painful memories, of a cynically different reality, changed in hopes, an autobiography of souls denatured from their identity, even in the details, as Max Collini tells in "Cinnamon". The secret (understood by few), hidden in "Robespierre", lies in recounting apparently insignificant episodes, lateral tales of small moments of socialist daily life, as if it were a corollary of events, a drawer of memories, a melancholic almanac.

Analyzing an album like this from a strictly musical point of view seems useless, inadequate; it's like commenting on the beauty of flowers in a coffin. Because it's a funeral, it commemorates the death of the C.C.C.P., the Area, and in this case, the band plays with synthesizers and a narrating voice, like in a documentary of a world that is no longer and will never be again. What remains then? A bust of Lenin remains, crying white tears, an emblem of resignation, told in "Piccola Pietroburgo". The end of a love, recounted in "De Fonseca, is not just a farewell to a woman, but to a universe.

A universe that in 1975 was expanding, but now, sucked into a black hole, leaves a silence that closes the album in the final 18 minutes. Interminable as a goodbye.