P.G.R.
Montesole 29 giugno 2001

LA RECENSIONE

The CCCP were one of the most important and influential punk bands of the '80s. The C.S.I. were the only group to offer an intellectually valid alternative to the (laudable) post-punk wave of the '90s. The P.G.R., however, another reincarnation of Ferretti and company, failed to develop a project that started from equally solid and innovative foundations.

This album confirms it. The lineup, devoid of Massimo Zamboni, now proposes, under the new name, a sort of world music that takes on sounds and rhythms entirely unusual for the band and its audience. Personally, while listening to them, I thought that there must have been some influence from an album by Andrea Chimenti from 1992, “La maschera del corvo nero,” which the group surely listened to and knows well (produced by Maroccolo and Magnelli). Unfortunately, the final result is disappointing. I believe the main problem is the excessive space that the group has given to the couple (in music and in life) Magnelli - Di Marco, which in my opinion has been a weak point of the band since the C.S.I. In particular, the saturated and monotonous sound of the keyboards, pretentiously renamed “magnellophoni,” creates an atmosphere of perpetual embarrassment, within which any other sound is belittled and lacks impact.

The result of this work, a live document of the band (released in 2003), is even worse than the studio album. Indeed, it features new songs that, at the time of the concert, the group had composed, as well as reworkings of pieces from their repertoire, with alarming results. “Unità di produzione” (from the 1997 album Tabula Rasa Elettrificata), which had its backbone in the deep and robust bass line, is presented under a deluge of ethereal, dreamy, naive, dated keyboards. The singing, filtered through an improbable vocoder, gets lost in a sea of “Bontempi organ” style chords. Relegated to a corner, if you strain your ears, you can vaguely hear the guitar of Giorgio Canali. Tabula rasa mortified. What's missing is that dichotomy, represented by the back-and-forth between Ferretti and Zamboni which made the sound of previous works so personal and recognizable.

Having lost the visionary, anarchic, noise-making part of the band, the group cannot stand on its own. The result is that Ferretti's hieratic voice no longer finds the counterpoint of the guitarist’s abrasive, unbalanced, and improvised sound, but only keyboards, keyboards, keyboards. Zamboni, where are you?