Premiata Forneria Marconi
Pfm? Pfm!

The title of this 1984 album by PFM aims to convey to their fans that times may change and bring new trends, but they will always be ready to be present, changing, transforming their form and music, yet never denying the past and the musical class that characterizes them. In reality, it is difficult to survive the treacherous 80s for a band that, like others, rode the prolific wave of the 70s. The change of "form" succeeded in the previous two studio albums and was very well documented in the live "Performance". However, now the four survivors have created a work that seeks to be in full harmony with the times but pays tremendously in terms of quality and originality.

The opening track, "Capitani Coraggiosi", is a moderate commercial success in Europe, it's a song with strong danceable accents and very easy, mostly built on a fixed structure of guitar, bass, and drums supported by a drum machine, while the keyboards perfectly carve out the reprise with an easily catchy theme. So far, nothing to say; the piece is well executed, a sign that the band is always capable of withstanding changes in musical currents and fully absorbing them. With "Sentimentalmente", however, the listener encounters a decent reggae, synthetic but overall with all the typical contours of this music; Mussida's acoustic guitar part at the end is beautiful, but the rest is somewhat flat. Lucio Fabbri's violin appears in the intro of "Marlon Brando", but it's a fleeting appearance, and the track is stifling and doesn't offer much inspiration, passing anonymously. The ballad "Attimo Di Musica" is more successful, but nothing exceptional. The rest of the work is sterile and decidedly awful, exhausted pop-rock atmospheres that collapse on themselves and end up only boring and weighing down the listening experience.

An album that ultimately leaves nothing to the listener, understandably the most forgotten by the critics and especially by its authors, like the subsequent "Miss Baker", for completionists only.