Uochi Toki
Idioti

The Italian duo Uochi Toki brought meaning to rap, a genre that has never managed to capture my passion, unsurprisingly hated by genre fans and much loved by those looking for something else. A duo that managed to tell, with a predominantly terrorist narrative, a separate universe—violent but not too much, metaphorical yet realistic and everyday. They narrated the world like no one else, in two revolutionary albums such as the deeply felt "Libro Audio" and, above all, a masterpiece like "Cuore Amore Errore Disintegrazione," a true story of life, capable of alternating philosophy and reflection with explosions of anger, sarcastic irony, caustic humor, sadness, and fury.

And then, the long-awaited new album, just released: "Idioti," greeted by the two creators with the usual ironic provocation: "it's our pop breakthrough". Nothing could be more false, or rather almost. Because indeed, after the anarchic destruction that characterized them so far, with a tension and a radical openness toward a new type of narration, where the sound and the base become a fundamental part of the story, they adopted a sort of lopsided song form (sometimes even with choruses and sung parts!). And if before the beauty of their sound research lay in creating films without images, now the focus is on music, with results that could have been revolutionary but instead first bore and then irritate. Except for the splendidly nervous opening of "Ecce Robot," a destructive alienation of sepulchral and explosive sounds, unsurprisingly chosen as the first single, the album doesn't work at all. On the contrary, it bores to death. The sounds have nothing left to express, except for a poorly executed attempt at experimentation. And so, heavy percussion, glitch, minimalist electronics take over. And that's even fine, but the lyrics are also missing. Yes indeed: what the two sonic narrators did best gets destroyed. So, out with the non-biting irony, the stereotypes, the tired repetitions, phrases that don't bite, lyrics that seem only sketched. There's no point in mentioning the other tracks because they don't exist.

"Idioti" is the realm of emptiness, of perjury, of a group of impostors passing themselves off as the "illustrious." Right. We didn't see that coming. But this album is not transitional: it's a complete failure. Boredom closes our eyelids, and the scrotum drops to the floor.