Scritti Politti
White Bread Black Beer

Hordes of record executives, like supplicants, flock to the doors of billionaire villas with a mellifluous and yielding demeanor, ready to fulfill any desire, grotesque caricatures of genies from the lamp. An army of A&R reps, often inclined to all sorts of excess, is thus courted, pampered, and very lavishly financed so that they can deliver a task at least every two years to feed the burgeoning ranks of teenagers who regularly undergo brainwashing.

In contrast, talented, unconventional authors with a marked personality and a not insignificant cultural background, like Green Gatside, mind and soul of Scritti Politti, are forced to stay on the sidelines, publishing 2 albums in 18 years (!). The reasons for all this, since in the world of the music biz numbers, units sold, and managers in suits count almost absolutely, would be redundant to explain. In Green's case, there are also "aggravating circumstances" due to his reputation as a troublesome author, "polyptych," and his rather lazy, disoriented nature, entirely unsuitable for adhering to the market's pace and deadlines. So, like in a game of goose, our hero has returned to the starting square, the illustrious Rough Trade with which he debuted in the distant '82 with "Songs To Remember."

The atmosphere of Farina's home has undoubtedly rejuvenated Green, who was able to write songs without the "Sword of Damocles" of a hit at all costs looming over him. Performance anxiety had not only driven him to the brink of a nervous breakdown and concert panic but had led him to make artistic choices not always up to his songwriting potential. It can certainly be said that the recent "White Bread Night Beer" restores to us an author who was too hastily assigned to the multicolored swarm of eighties meteors. Particularly, Green shows he has freed himself from that cage they had led him into and perhaps he himself had also contributed to building, stubbornly seeking the reproduction of his classic song formula; sometimes simply modifying the accompanying "sauce," as happened with the hip-hop or reggae of the previous (1999!) erratic "Anomie & Bonhomie."

That the approach has changed and that in the newly found creative vein new vital fluid has returned to flow, you notice immediately; just listen to the first two minutes of the surprising “The Boorn Boorn Bap": dub flavors, well-calibrated samples, a warm and enveloping club mood, and our man's unmistakable voice delivering the killer chorus. But the major novelty, if it can be said so, of the album is not so much the well-guessed Bristolian-like vein, calmly electronic, also testified by the excellent “Petrococadollar," an iron fist in a velvet glove, as much as the return to musical models from his adolescent training, pre-punk. The vinyl records of Californian dream-pop, Brian Wilson semper docet, Anglo-Saxon folk, but also Wyatt's evergreens seem to have been dusted off from the box of memories. The prevailing atmosphere of "White Bread Black Beer," therefore, is relaxed and intimate, with tracks like "Dr. Abernathy," "Snow in Sun," "Robin Hood" giving the clear sensation of an artist speaking openly, revealing himself without guile.

In the last track of the album, the placement is never random, the aforementioned "Robin Hood," Gatside states: "I dream of ending these dreams of mine." I think there's a lot of him in this phrase, both the old and the new Green, between "the white bread" of hope and "the dark beer" of disillusionment. Let's give him a hand not to become cynical.