Pooh
Contrasto

THE REVIEW

Contrasto, Memorie, Opera Prima, Il colore dei pensieri e Pinocchio. These are the five albums out of the 29 of Pooh's unreleased material that have not yet been reviewed on Debasio. And since these days, from August 6 to 12, I'm reviewing their entire discography, a total of 345 songs, I've decided to fill in the gaps. Let's start with Contrasto. This second album was released two years after Per quelli come noi, and was withdrawn from the market a few weeks after its release, making it a genuine rarity today. There are 11 songs in total. A good part of the lyrics were written by Pantros, that is Armando Sciascia, the producer of the album with his Vedette. We are still at the phase where only Roby and Riccardo sing; Dodi will sing for the first time in the same year in the single Buonanotte Penny, and Red and Stefano will sing in the first half of the '70s, by which time the lineup had stabilized. Being the '60s, all the songs are short, between 2 and 3 minutes in length, no more. The pieces that have remained in collective memory and in concert setlists are the very famous Piccola Katy, the band's first real hit, and In silenzio, which will be enhanced in 1990 with Roby Facchinetti's reinterpretation for the album 25... la nostra storia. There are also two tracks that will be reworked and presented under different titles: Il buio mi fa paura, also presented as Cose di questo mondo, and La leggenda della luna, reinterpreted in the following Memorie album as La fata della luna. Notably, there's Contrasto, an instrumental track that will later be reworked in 1973 for the writing of the second part of Parsifal. Essentially, it's an album that continues in the vein of the first, we're in the Pooh beat era. They will remain so for another album, Memorie, which I am now going to review. To this Contrasto, 3 stars, a middle-of-the-road score for an album that is certainly not bad but not yet an expression of the group's maturity.