Planet Funk
The Great Shake

Italian pride of the last ten years, one of the most appreciated Italian bands abroad in recent years returns to the studio.
Their market strategy was unusual for our times: long tour starting in June in their Naples (I was personally present) and lasting for a few months, until the album release, which happened just 3 months later. And perhaps this waiting strategy benefited this album and its spread. But now let's listen to it.

Planet Funk have matured. This is what emerges from the first listen of this (highly anticipated) album by the Tuscan-Neapolitan band. Forget albums like their debut: a collection of (great) hits, derived from various periods of activity, various collaborations, and various ideas.
In this album, however, there's a very well-defined idea: take all the cries and echoes of 80s pop and chew it up with the teeth of 2011. Starting with the new vocalist, Alex Uhlmann, who has a voice that vaguely reminds of Dave Gahan at times. After all, there’s always been an admiration of PF for the 80s, and perhaps the former vocalist Dan Black did not have that suitable timbre they were looking for. With Alex, maybe they've hit the jackpot and thus reached their ultimate maturity as a band: because the fact that we have an electronic/pop album in front of us with just 9 tracks is already an indication of quality preferred over quantity.
Moreover (excluding the pleasant single “Another Sunrise,” a huge success) you won't find singles with a strong impact, but a great sonic coherence and a pleasant light atmosphere.
In these flirtatious nine color variations, besides the aforementioned first single, note the collaboration with Giuliano Sangiorgi from Negramaro in the track “Ora il mondo è perfetto,” a synthesis of their desire to mix pop with electronics, in a modernly retro perspective.
After all, this has always been the strength of this band: knowing how to always renew themselves, always expressing different music, different albums (e.g., the concept “Static”). Musically, this might resemble their second “The Illogical Consequence”, which perhaps lacked in some empty passages, here totally absent.

In short, it's not the album of the year or the decade, but it's worth listening to at least once because Planet Funk, after more than 10 years of career and scattered hits here and there, definitively prove to create good music with soul, and these days that's not a small thing.