What sunscreen songs, what a musicality, who sounds rickenbacker rings, that happy references to the electrified folk season of the Byrds, to the infinite summer of the beach boys, to the songwriters of Laurel Canyon, to Venice Beach and Santa Monica, at the Los Angeles of the 60s. And that dark stories of our empty and atrocious existences, small miseries, disgusting, death. El Galacticothe second album resulting from the re -foundation of the baustelle, often leverages the contrast between the sound choices and the texts in which an increasingly pressing search for meaning emerges. It's a great record, and it's the thing that matters.
The reflective song will also have become a small bourgeois art, especially if compared to the proletarian and fanfaronesca epwheel epic, the great dream of individual enrichment, to the claimed authenticity of those who make songs an accounting of money and girls. But if there is someone who knows how to do it well, if there is someone able to put small stories and tremendous sometimes in songs sung at the top of his lungs, using words that no one intones anymore, those are Francesco Bianconi, Rachele Bastreghi and the baustelle. They scan irony and cynicism, which they do not bring anywhere, and tell the difficulty that we all try to be in the world and to be well.
They do it in songs written after the tour of Elvis Which are often fun and touching at the same time, more effective precisely because they are out of the patterns and distinctly Baustellian, especially in the melodies. In here there are pieces of a world in pieces: our shipwreck in nothing, free cruelty, the bad imitation of love, the life that becomes contentthe reduction of possibilities, desertification outside and within us. That's why there are such records: we are all like the protagonist of Giulia how are youeager for songs that embrace us and tell us that the world burns, but not everything is lost.
“What do you want me to tell you except that there has always been this theme a little a bit in the Baustelle in which I find myself,” says Bianconi, who loves to mention the poet The Customs Housethe compass that “should go crazy to the adventure and the calculation of the dice no longer returns”. We are in his Milanese study surrounded by shelves full of magnificent essays on music, guitars, a Dylan poster, the models of Country Life of the Roxy Music, a wallpaper that seems to have come out of a Wes Anderson film. “On this album” says Bianconi “there is the attempt to try to make sense of this nonsense.”
And therefore el Galactic It is a disk of pop songs that lend themselves, as indeed often happens with the baustelle, at two levels of reading. You can sing the refrains and move on to the subsequent songs of the very strong playlist who suggests Spotify. Or realize that it is an album in its own way, which tells our collective disorientation. Comes to purify itself, as the narrator of Strip meor to mask reality with Fogbecause it makes so horror that it is necessary to conceal its vision and consciousness.
There are also three, four pieces that speak of death and moreover the album is dedicated to Ilvo, Bianconi's father who died in May 2024 hit by a car. Opens with Pesaroa true story, the singer who receives tragic and wandering news on the promenade lost in his thoughts, between love and death. Moana Pozzi is one step away from the end who on the death bed puts the thoughts and memories of a lifetime, but there is nothing sad in the way in which Bianconi describes it and the sings Bastreghi, indeed, Moana's philosophy It transmits euphoria. And then there is The art of letting goon our vain and frenetic attempts not to accept decadence and death.
If El Galactico It's a nice album, it's above all because he has songs. As A story What (we bet?) will end up being considered one of the best things of the year. We do not know what happened to the protagonist, but thanks to the moved and at the same time measured interpretation we start for her, which was the victim of something, it was filmed, it ended up on the net, it is in the flow of all these stories without history and would only like to disappear. If El Galactico It is a nice album is also for the pleasantness of the arrangements, the sound stratifications and the embellishments made with wind instruments, keyboards of all kinds, guitars, arches, and for the “body” that the refounded and re-stimulated baustelle give to the songs.
There is nothing particularly new, nor innovative in the most classically rock sound that went to look for co-producer Federico Nardelli with co-producer, but it is perfect, this sound, to dictate the tone to the disc that was born from the vision of a sign of a place from the parts of via Padova in Milan, El Galactico in fact, which has started looking for sounds and inspirations in southern California. “In the head I had the first of the byrds, the first of the Doors, the beach boys in the years in which they evolved, the Mamas and Papas, the Buffalo Springfield, a sparkling and glorious sound, bearer of a sort of sunnying that was nice to put in a baustelle album, which are more associated with the 70s”.
One of the books present in Bianconi's study is The rest is noiseremarkable essay by Alex Ross on the music of the twentieth century. And just one of its protagonists, Luciano Berio, said that “there is music and music”, indeed made us the title of one of his beautiful television program of disclosure. This is a bit about what the baustelle say in this album that will come out on Friday, his songs finally mixed with tens of thousands of others, with the hope that they will not be lost. If there is music and music, it is not a matter of right or wrong references, it counts what you say and how you say it, it counts the fact that these songs describe a world and ask questions.
Two instrumental, Forever And It is not an endare in the queue respectively to The art of letting go And Fog. The first has something of Morriconian, the second rises to one of the passions of the old baustelle, the one for the Space Lounge of the Stereolab. There is also a kind of editorial sung on the state of the Italian song, The imitation of love. The vertigo of certain texts that told life as it is, while today there is a “proliferation of obscene of emotions and heart” is regretted. “Today the world produces a single great comfortable music,” says Bianconi and is the only moment of our brief conversation in which it will break up a little. “And as long as I am alive I will make music that makes you uncomfortable.” And that makes you sing, that discomfort.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
