Article by Umberto Scaramozzino | Photo by Luca Moschini
We've been talking about it for months Dogsof their recording comeback and their live return. Everything has already been said, including the inevitable hyperbolic ironies about what it was reunion most important music of the year. It would therefore have been easy to arrive at the first of two Turin dates with dampened enthusiasm and the feeling of participating in something that has now exhausted its hype and has returned to being ordinary administration.
But no: al Concordia Theatre Of Royal Venariain the province of Turinthe air is electric as if Niccolo Contessa was still undecided about the future of his band and the outcome itself depended on the public's response.
The roar that welcomes the Roman combo is deafening, much closer to that of a sports hall than that of a club. This is the Piedmontese's turn and it doesn't matter how many other evenings have taken place in the rest of Italy: the emotion is great.
The triptych composed of “I”, “black hole” and “cough” introduces the new album – “Post-mortem“- and starts a process of canonization that rarely works so well. It took very little for Cani's fourth recording chapter to become a new pillar of the repertoire and the public's response is overwhelming proof of this. But it's not just the songs that work properly: the lights, the sounds, the aura of the musicians. Everything in the right placeall calibrated for the affirmation of one of the best Italian live acts today.
The only one having difficulty is the new guitarist, Marcellus Aeneas Newmanwho struggles for a third of the concert with technical problems and despite this holds his ground and never loses his composure. Tangled cables, disconnected and reconnected, finally replaced, as well as the guitars themselves, until the good Marcello manages to re-enter the never-interrupted flow of Contessa and co. Normally if the only guitar in a six-piece band fails, the concert fails, even if it's electropop. But in the case of Dogs there is a sort of centripetal force which maintains the circular motion of the performance, while the entire audience rotates together with the band.
The lineup cannot please everyone and in fact it doesn't. Indeed, there are probably many who feel various itches when the encore approaches and pieces like “There's nothing twee” or “It won't end” are missing. At that point fear pushes the chants of incitement to be as explicit as possible: “If you don't make Lexotan we won't leave”. And luckily it arrives, not before “A Stupid Thing”, extremely emotional. “Lexotan” is instead the liberating outburst. Contessa first humbly asks them to put away their cell phones and then faces the audience and launches into some awkward and badly managed crowd surfing, which however makes the evening even more real, even more memorable.
How did Cani, with their indie pop, undermine the alternative music of the 1910s and return to the mid-1920s with the institutionality of a generational project? It is difficult to find an exhaustive answer, but the Turin concert, like all the previous ones in this glorious return tour, seems to communicate that it is a double perfect stormtoday as then.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
