Pooh
Viva

Fully aware of the criticism that this reviewer will receive, I dare fate and speak well, indeed very well, of a Pooh album. Which is the only Pooh album I would speak highly of (I swear, Your Honor), also because, due to a friend, a true friend, who has always been obsessed with the Pooh, I've listened to them all, and generally they all kind of disgust me, except for something here and there (Parsifal) but not much. The Pooh of the '70s, it must be said, had their dignity, they were excellent musicians (not outstanding, in the prog of those years there were better musicians, think of Osanna or Banco, to name two random groups, but Pooh held their ground). Then, with the arrival of the synth and the '80s, they lost themselves in unpresentable albums (very little is worth saving from that decade); in the '90s their survival instinct mummified them into poor copies of what they once were; today they play stadiums and sports halls like grandparents wander, confused, through the corridors of a retirement home. And so we've outlined the Pooh (or what's left of them, poor D'Orazio left us a few years ago).

"Viva" is a very happy, and surprising, exception. Year: 1979. They come from the success of the previous "Boomerang" (1978) which sold in droves, they feel disco music growing around them (to tell the truth, it had already grown a bit) and they dive headlong into the recording studio (there's a kind of behind-the-scenes of this album on YouTube that is very interesting, then of course the Rolling Stones had Godard, but oh well). The result is a terribly (in a good way, to be said) pop album, with some rock whims and a lot of disco, almost as if they had filtered multiple styles at once. It hasn't happened to them many times, in fact never. It is played excellently (D'Orazio's solos, ah...), sounds like something very un-Italian and very USA (the single "Io sono vivo" cites the Bee Gees), has beautiful rock-pop attacks ("Tutto adesso"), finally the love songs are less sugary and more substantial ("Una donna normale"), the choruses are convincing ("Notte a sorpresa") and they even manage to be convincing when they tell about Red Canzian's Indian blackbird ("Susanna e basta") in an anthropomorphic sense (and a nice guitar solo supports the track). Obviously, in a very "alive" album, indeed, the escalation of the famous "L'ultima notte di caccia" cannot be overshadowed, which is, in my humble opinion, the best piece of the entire Pooh career. That it's a miracle (drums, guitar, bass: everything works wonderfully) is demonstrated by the Pooh themselves, repeating its structure somewhat in the next album with the track "Inca": a mess, puah.

It ends beautifully with the title track, an instrumental piece with some special effects, just the artistic flourish since at the time the Pooh staged live shows that, visually, had few equals in the world and none in their homeland, musically one might contest (someone called them the Italian Pink Floyd, let's move on...).

Ten tracks of which at least 7 are of incredibly high level, and a trio less effective ("In concerto", which closes side A, is a drag), but, starting from the refined very '70s cover, it's an album, in its world, in its genre, in its time, literally impeccable.