Tricarico
Frescobaldo Nel Recinto

Tricarico is a truly original singer-songwriter. It is even difficult to define him as a proper singer-songwriter in the canonical sense of the term, especially when compared to Italian ones. His soliloquies, those of the first album, despite their apparent dose of nonsense and heart-love rhymes directly retrieved from our traditional way of making songs, were only at a proxemic distance from this musical world, which still seems false, monotonous, and squalid (that of Gigi D'Alessio and the neomelodics, to be clear). Going to Sanremo was, for him, a constraint from the record company that the direct interested party was consenting to, perhaps disappointed by the lack of promotion of his second album "Frescobaldo Nel Recinto," a work that I am about to review.

After the enormous success of the debut single ("Io Sono Francesco") and the naive electronic excursions of the first self-titled album, followed by the 2002 tour as Jovanotti's supporter, Tricarico leverages a more "played" sound of reggae/soul derivation, devoured by the influence of the two producers Patrick Benifei (Casino Royale, Soul Kingdom) and Fabio Merigo (Reggae National Tickets). However, the work does not stray too far from the standards of the Milanese author, and even with less electronic, it manages to perfectly reproduce (but with less incisiveness) the already tested and focused textual stylistics in "Tricarico." The titles of the tracks are always very short, and in some cases, each title appears blurred compared to the impressions that the piece communicates through allegorical images or through the enunciation of simple fairytale-like narratives in the first person (as in "Ragazza Little", almost a modern reinterpretation of "Cinderella"). For instance, it is unclear why the last track is titled "Sommergibile Blu" and not a medieval castle (enclosed?), a metaphorical residence of Tricarico, who is its sovereign, invaded by evil forces that will force him to surrender and die. This last track seems to summarize a bit the title of the whole work: "Frescobaldo" is Tricarico's nickname given by a friend, the "enclosure" is instead the circumscribed area in which the artist moves, almost a small inner empire (represented by the castle in the aforementioned "Sommergibile Blu") where ideals are continually revealed (the blatant disdain for hunting, fueled by the impudent desire for money in "Animali"), candid memories (the anxiety of marriage in "Sposa Laser"), reminiscences of old fairy tales ("Ragazza Little") and childhood flashbacks ("Mamma No", "Cavallino").

"Acquedotto Fosforescente" is a fun and catchy pseudo-ska, "Formiche" is punk reimagined and filtered by Tricarico, impregnated with an absurd and absurdly deep text. "Cielo Rosa" and "Ogni Giorno" are mere fillers, boring and which rehash syntactic schemes already worn in Trichiarichian poetry.

It is this very underlying repetitiveness that diverts attention from the positive elements the album offers and makes "Frescobaldo Nel Recinto" overall a half misstep in the singer's career, a work that undoubtedly draws (perhaps too much) from his personal experiences (which had made the meta-Barrettian "Tricarico" magnificent), but in its reiteration of "old" things and addition of "new," shifts the focus more on the old without, however, finding the magic of the debut album. He will stylistically redeem himself with the next and much more acclaimed "Giglio," marked by a precise and coherent pop/rock turn, but at the expense of originality.

Rating: 3 and a half for charm