Samuele Bersani
Caramella smog

THE REVIEW

When I was still a darn kid who didn’t even know what a dog was, my parents had a lot of CDs that they played every chance they got. There was a bit of everything: Ligabue, Negramaro, Bandabardò, Rino Gaetano, but most importantly there was this CD (obviously burned because my parents didn’t spend money on music) that profoundly shaped me and today I see it as a mirror of those years: I’m talking (in case you haven’t seen the name of the artist and the album, which is unlikely) about Caramella smog, signed by the master Samuele Bersani.

Upon the first listen I gave the album after more than ten years, I found it very peculiar: yes, it manages to be a pleasant album, but it talks about decidedly non-simple things (I imagine myself at two years old, not knowing what a minority shareholder or the EEC was), sometimes coming across as complex while remaining "pop". Two of these are the title track (with those psychedelic choruses that keep me up even now) and Meraviglia. But Caramella smog is also the folk rock of Socio di minoranza, the soft bossa nova of Pensandoti, the amusing bluntness of Il destino di un VIP, the bouncing irony of Salto la convivenza. Even the lesser tracks (in my modest opinion) manage to hold their own in this album: Concerto doesn’t have an original theme but is very well written, and Se ti convincerai sings about love in a text that could have been better developed (but the music is truly spine-tingling). At the end of the day, the best pieces of the album are two: Cattiva and Conforme alla CEE. The first, quite well-known, manages to talk about television, murders (but also marketing, if you notice) while staying within a pop song composed of folk and rock nuances, in short, one of the best tracks of the last twenty years. Instead, Conforme alla CEE, unlike Cattiva, didn’t get any attention (in fact, it seems to me even Samuelone forgot about it) and it’s a shame because it’s a great song, very well constructed: through images of objects, it describes the sense of despair that the modern man feels, and trust me that’s no small feat. (considering also the music, which combines an excellent guitar riff with a lot of elements that make everything sound very vintage).

In essence, for me, this album remains the pinnacle of Bersani, despite two other excellent albums like L'oroscopo speciale and L'aldilà but they lack that underlying complexity that makes Caramella smog a unique album in Italian music of the 2000s.

P.S Let's hope to soon get back to “going out of the neighborhood once a month”.