Ottavo Padiglione
Fuori Posto

Light-hearted and crazy songs these by Ottavo Padiglione, whose name derives from the number of the ward of the Livorno hospital, once home to the city's mental health department.

Voice, guitar, bass, drums, and massive doses of accordions and violins for truly authorial songs, but tinged with clear and bitter madness. "Mental health doctor help me forget who I am more and more... with a megaphone in hand from a building up here I shout, I’ll jump down if you don't come back" recites Roberto Rondelli (vocals and guitar) in the opening "Sei andata via" in the grip of a post-love crisis. Scathing, provocative, and highly topical lyrics as in "Overdose Adventure" where the theme of drug addiction is treated with apparent lightness "To me it seems very dark, come on don't be afraid injected slowly you turn upside down like a caiman", or in the irreverent and tough spoken "Gimme Money" targeting a hypothetical American tourist dealing with smoke sellers and pimps "Gimme money... American I give you Hashish... give me the money American let's go to whores... . He's a transvestite American can't you see he has a workload that bigger is not there. .parappaparappappààà..." A tango-like track accompanies us in "Dal balcone" where the amused and incredulous eye of a voyeur prepares "every evening from the balcony" and awaits the attraction of "her slowly undressing." Her who "...hypnotizes body and mind" for a sort of Bocca di Rosa twenty years later, capable of centering the attention of an entire condominium to the point that "...the women of the building have already collected signatures, they've boarded up the window...". In "Giulio", the all-around sacrilegious and unfiltered look of the band led and orchestrated by Rondelli addresses pedophilia with shrewdness and narrates the downward arc of Giulio the old 72-year-old pervert who gave little candies to girls in courtyards until one day he was beaten to death by the stick of popular justice "Giulio deceased in the hospital... because no one understood Giulio the pervert...". Amusing is the voice of Giulio that introduces and appears halfway through a song that, for the topic covered and the "lightness" with which it was dealt with, would have deserved to be broadcast on all radios as socially useful, in spite of the tedious and useless pseudo-cultural in-depth programs, crammed full of banally complicated professors, mustached and not, of nothingness... The album closes, encapsulating social issues and neuroses typical of our urban era without stimuli and without reference points for young people. (as one of the above-mentioned professors would say), a letter of apology, an act of repentance that we could all have written towards the betrayed girlfriend "forgive me love if I always cheated on you", to the mother to whom we did not spare hardships "sorry mom I never worked" towards the best friend "sorry friend if I never returned all that money you lent me" and even towards the police station and the dear neighbor (do you see how the typical neuroses of urban civilization like ours come out??!!) "of whom I thought is a real fool..."; an act of repentance that ends in tragedy after apologizing to everyone announcing "...tomorrow I'll shoot myself!!!... I'll shoot myself...". A moment of pause to bitterly conclude: "(...the day after...) thank you all for forgiving me, now I'm ready for what I declared yesterday, but today is another day and I'm more carefree if I said that I would shoot myself now I say I was joking... yes, tomorrow I'll shoot myself, yes maybe tomorrow oh yes yes... but a nice jerk off I'll shoot myself..."

Splendid and entertaining bittersweet look at our (non)civilization recommended to everyone: beautiful and ugly, priests and nuns, big and small, men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, housewives and whores, thieves and cops, drug addicts and dealers, workers and managers, loafers and common people.