a free and courageous album (review)

Cesare Cremonini, Alaska Baby: review of the new album out Friday 29 November for EMI Records Italy / Universal Music Italy.

Cesare Cremonini returns with a very bright, extremely sincere album, which ranges between different musical genres, entrusting a very central role to the orchestra, which makes the elegant and at times hypnotic soundwhile the band is already screening the album on the stages of the main Italian stadiums, where the singer-songwriter will perform next summer.

Alaska Baby it is the return album (from a long journey from Antigua until Arctic Circle), but it also represents a new beginning. It is the album of rebirth, rich as it is in vital impulses and an incredible desire to live:

“Nothing scares us and makes us vulnerable like happiness. I left to look for her and returned with an album full of light. The restlessness, the redemption, the ecstasy, everything passes through the courage to love, something that we inevitably feel we deserve, but which worries and scares us. We are all in need of this, of find the courage to be reborn through love“.

And it is perhaps for all this that Alaska Baby it sounds like a first album: “It's an album born on the border, in which once again I tried to overcome my limits“, tells Cremoniniwhich in the last two years has also experimented a lot on a textual level.

But what is striking about this new recording project is that it is the same Cremonini defines a “musical storm“, is without a doubt the soundcapable of returning very precise images. But all this is thanks, once again, to the Bolognese singer-songwriter, who has always been skilled at transforming the life that flows around him and everything that inhabits him into sounds and words, including the excitement of admiring an aurora for the first time boreal.

And so sometimes the atmospheres become rarefied, in a perennial movement that leads from darkness to light and vice versa, as well as the lightness leave room forintrospectionat the depthand then became the protagonist again in songs such as Lemons.

Furthermore, “having been created out of necessity, contains songs that do not respond to the logic in vogue” and here inside we find songs that – in terms of duration – even exceed 6 minutes. But what matters is not the container, but the content. And it is perhaps precisely for this reason that, against all expectations, as he himself underlines Caesar,”the album is being incredibly liked by the platforms and the discography“.

In short, Alaska Baby it's a free and courageous album and, precisely for this reason, it has already won!

CESARE CREMONINI, “alaska baby”: the tracklist and travel itinerary

ALASKA BABY: THE TRACKLIST

Alaska baby
Now that I no longer have you
Northern Lights
Easy girls
Dark room
Saint Luke
A pink dawn
Streaming
Lemons
My heart is already yours
A poem
Acrobats

THE TRAVEL ITINERARY

ALASKA

USA

Seattle
Pacific Coast
Los Angeles
Joshua Tree (National Park)
Tucson
El Paso
Memphis
White Sands (National Park)
Nashville
Miami

ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA

ITALY

“ALASKA BABY”: THE TRACK BY TRACK REVIEW

The album begins with Alaska Baby and its kaleidoscope of sounds and musical genres, which blend together.

We then move on to Now that I no longer have you and to the first feat of the album, the one with Elisa on the notes of Aurora Borealis. Here the singer-songwriter's ethereal voice blends perfectly with that of Caesarwho sings about the fear of not being up to par and the desire for normality, of “shake hands, tell us what's inside us and not regret tomorrow“.

Then it's the turn of Easy Girlsa song in which the search for happiness we were talking about before begins to emerge. A happiness caged by “few words and too many mental masturbations“. Cremonini it then puts the feelings on hold and, together with Mike Garson (Dark Room), enters the first large black hole on the disk, in an attempt to ward off demons that will never disappear, unless… Saint Luke come to our aid.

And here comes the feat con Luca Carboni: “Does it happen to you that you no longer want to wait for happiness, just like me?“. But happiness is not the only pillar of this song. At his side we also find the faith in humanity,”which makes miracles happen every day and is my favorite religion“.

And here it is Cremonini sings: “I don't know how to say a prayer. I only ask for what comes true, so I'm sure no one here loses“. And again: “Does it happen to you too that you keep waiting for miracles? Like you, I don't know how to do them, but then it's wonderful to hope that that's not all“.

But that's not all! After having drawn the boundary that separates the earth from the sky, Cremonini in fact it also talks about lonelinessbut it does so by giving this term a positive meaning. In fact, solitude in this passage becomes a tool for “be“, rediscover yourself and no longer feel alone.

From solitude we then move on to pain of habitwhich is also an obsession and fear of loneliness itself (A pink dawn). And here everything changes. In fact, the rhythmic pace varies and the singer-songwriter takes us into the era of Streamingwhere each of us has the opportunity to become a “poetry“, something that escapes that flow and decides to stop on a blank page, to rest or – more simply – stay.

And of poetry the penultimate track of the album also speaks, which prepares the way, or rather the rope, for the Acrobats Of Alaska Babywho invite us to never cry, going through this uncertain and complex time with their own desire to risk everything and everything in one “crossing“.

Songs better: Now that I no longer have you, Aurore Boreali feat Elisa, Dark Room feat Mike Garson and San Luca feat Luca Carboni
Songs less successful: Lemons and My heart is already yours feat Meduza