I came across Sandri by chance, like when you get home by car at night and on the side of the road you glimpse an animal that you can't recognise. You swerve to avoid killing it, but then you immediately stop to understand what kind of beast it was. It depends a bit on where you live. For me it is often a porcupine, a fox, an owl, a badger on good evenings. Well that night it was a Sandri, and I immediately recognized it. Sandri is a freak of nature, an animal in danger of extinction: the only way to save him is not to contaminate his ecosystem. It is among the 516 animal species that are disappearing, next on the list after the giant panda, the little tamaraw and the Iberian lynx. This review of Animal shopshis latest album released today, is an invitation not to listen to it, if you can. Or at least to listen to it discreetly. Because it is a protected species, and must be preserved. At the cost of never letting him out of the woods. This guided listening is a small guide on how to prevent Sandri's extinction. Thirteen reasons – one for each song – to continue not listening to him and protect his creative habitat.
The first reason not to start listening to Sandri right now – saving him – is that it is a project that is anything but new. He's already released an album, Opetand two EPs: Exhibitions And Entertainment. If you only hear about him now, is there a reason, or not? You might as well not even start.
The second reason is that he sings and plays the guitar, but he is actually a classical double bass player. He's from Cesena, he hung out with orchestras, he has a group he no longer plays with but technically he never disbanded. He speaks with a strong Romagna accent, and – above all – he was a Musicultura finalist in 2022. But he didn't win.
The third is that Animal shops It's a record that doesn't make it clear whether it's singer-songwriter, or whether it wants to deconstruct the song form. An unbearable alternation that ends up removing even more references than the projects that make the deconstruction of the song form their only creed. And then Sandri groups together 13 songs, keeps too many things in them, too different from each other, and does it in a discreet and natural way. With grace. Either he's a thief, or he's a genius. He manages to hold together in an explicit manner, but with balance and the necessary care, the most exquisitely classic Italian songwriting tradition, with the best Italian songwriters of the last fifteen years. Lucio Dalla (in Night of a dog barking) meets Andrea Laszlo de Simone (Longiana And Animal shops). Alberto Ferrari (in Not even time for a commercial. 2) is following Francesco De Gregori (in Nina). He does it in a totally sincere way and with a punk posture, a bit like Ivan Graziani, a bit like Freak Antoni. It's a large table on the seafront on the Riviera, everyone brought something and Sandri made the food, in a Fellini dream. Not surprisingly, both side A and side B of the vinyl open with a lullaby. The first is a song, a lullaby in Romagna. The second is a noire and alcoholic dirge, which opens the second half of the circus show at the patronal festival. Here are the acrobats, the trapeze artists, Nino Rota, and we enter the REM phase with the B side, without the need for melatonin. The tent closes, whoever's inside is inside, and goodnight to the dreamers.
The fourth reason why not to listen to Sandri's new album, averting his extinction, is that it comes out on Friday the 17th. I have already told you the number of tracks contained in the LP. You see for yourself.
The fifth is that Sandri is Michele Alessandri's solo project, but also a band. Because there are five heads in the studio, participating in the process. Andrea Cola (Sunday Morning and Do Not Cry for the Country Boy), barefoot producer and guitarist. Jacopo Casadei on bass, brushes, and here and there writing. Simone Bartoletti Stella, to jazz and percussion. And Dino Bellardi, to strong emotions. In the latest work, on the pianos, also the accurate hands of Arturo Zanaica. They collaborate with Michele for different reasons, but mainly because – they say – it is a project that brings together. His poetics, his ability to create through images, and his timbre become a gravitational center: but the rest is there, in everyone's mix, and we manage to work on it horizontally despite the centripetal force, to fuel “a spark that they recognized in the scene”. Jacopo explains: «He is a singer-songwriter with a bass player's approach. He is not afraid to try, to question, to overturn, according to the feelings of the other members. Session player is a cursed word: we are a band with a great pen.” All of Sandri's music was recorded live at Andrea's StoneBridge Studio, in the Cesena countryside.
The sixth reason for not listening to Sandri and saving him is that, to the detriment of the band, the dress, the deconstruction, he is a real singer-songwriter, who knows how to capture you in a world – dream, imaginary, universe – from which it is not pleasant to have to leave. His magical turbo-realism of the particular – the clod of earth that he sees every morning, and not being able to photograph its brilliance, makes a song out of it – has the ability to become absolute. His rural and existential poetics – an authorial slant, starting from a cross-section of land and life, the narrator, the collective dimension that becomes personal – is a manifesto of his years, of his threshold generation, which is also mine, between Millennials and Gen Z. Socialized with still traditional expectations, crossed by the rejection of them, and forced to deal with the sense of inadequacy due to the perceived absence of models. Ideal types and redundant situations that become inventory of the late twenties, between the routine and the grotesque. Parenthood, instability, work, loneliness, the need for closeness, the fear of dying. The indecision between having a child and fellatio. Or both, since one thing doesn't exclude the other.
Photo: Marcella Magalotti
The seventh reason not to listen to it is that it is a stealthy and nocturnal animal, and therefore dangerous. Night of a dog barking it is a collection of twilight thoughts. Notebook of the night owl and cartography of insomniacs. A collection of things that happen in the night, but that you can't see. Or that they take for granted. Accompanied by a bit of healthy paranoia of someone who has just gone to live alone: «I thought: but now that I'm here alone, tonight, I get a cuddle. Even if someone notices or doubts, how do they know that the second copy of the keys to enter the house and save me is in the garage?”.
The eighth reason is that he wrote most of this album in two months, like a wild rabbit, in a hamlet called Polenta. And the evolution of the species, to the detriment of the cliché or the name of the place, is not based on adaptation but on the ability to (pro)create music.
The ninth reason is that he toured a record that hadn't yet been released. He brought it live Animal shopspremiered, in seven solo concerts. An open rehearsal – for him, and for us – even if no one had ever heard the pieces. «I needed it to become familiar with the songs, assimilate them, lay them bare as they were born, and then understand how to work them live». There is something peculiar about Sandri: after a concert of which you didn't know half a song you feel like you know him very well, on all levels, even without ever having spoken to him. Listening to what isn't there speaks to you in a brutal way. Animalistic in the movements and expressions, in the flapping of the feet and in the trapezoidal shape of the legs. A timbre that at times pierces, at others rarefies. Explosive dynamics, he goes on stage and forgets everything and acts crazy. Hair disheveled over the eyes, the face is covered and you cannot see the irises, in an effectively liminal condition between human and beast. Then the concert ends, the ferinity runs out, she pulls her hair back and it's Michele. You no longer recognize him, but you already knew him. You've never seen it, but it's familiar to you. It was him or it wasn't him. Does it depend on the moon?
The tenth reason is Miss Athe remaining demo, recorded at his house on a summer night a little naked, when you can hear crickets from the window and you're sweating in the heat. «The proximity of the microphone was such, and the gain so high, that at the end of the song you can clearly hear my skin peeling away from the classical guitar». An image that we would also have avoided for our readers, but which still gives a good idea.
The eleventh reason not to listen to him is that – it is clear – he doesn't know what he's talking about. Things explodedthe single by Animal shopsintroduces the theme of the primordial. The fast and ferocious animal. Being a den. Searching for shelter in the wild. He calls for a return to the wild, to the state of nature, without remembering that philosophical thinking is what distinguishes men from animals. He shouts that any other animal is better than us without placing this value judgment in anthropogenesis. He describes Ludovico as a small flying animal without referring to Kafka's immense zoopoetics. It is not clear whether he is unaware that identification with the animal is the discovery of one's own otherness. Maybe practice. But he doesn't know it. Or if he knows, he doesn't quote the philosophers anyway, and that's unacceptable. «Stopping for a moment, thinking and looking around, you feel incapable of doing anything, and that you don't know anything. We are nothing at all, and we often forget this. Only the wild counts, and in the end it will return.”
The twelfth reason to save him by never starting to listen to him is that he is a complainer. In his songs he complains about everything. Of our time. Of senselessness, of dejection, of disenchantment. Of the institutions, of the arms industry, of the music industry, of Milan, of abandonment, of the rulers, of the war. And after all the revolutionary harangues, the frustration, the alternating feeling of renunciation, the outbursts, everything dissolves – in the face of destruction and catastrophe – in the tenderness of an embrace. Or in the image of a child shooting an arrow at the moon. The singer-songwriter Sandri undermines the Guccinian adage that one can only write if one is in a dark mood. «It's the first time I've written so much about something that makes me feel good. Or that it's good for me. It's the first time I've said: I don't have to feel bad to write.” Chronic frustration, cynicism, anti-systemic anger that melts in the face of simple gestures. How about The Wizard and the Indian: «The little boy who looks at you and talks to you. He tells you to dress like me, put on your Indian costume, so you won't be afraid anymore. He takes your hand, and you feel calm.”
The Sandri project is the typical project that doesn't work for the music industry, because it doesn't fit. It's not clear if it's a band, or if it's a soloist. It is unclear whether he is a singer-songwriter or a deconstructor of the song form. It's not clear whether you're talking about love or loneliness. Nothing is understood. Here we didn't want to explain it, but to try to tell it a little, for the pure sake of safeguarding biodiversity.
The hope is that it continues to be ignored. Suppose it then goes into hype. Let everyone start listening to it. Let it start making numbers on Spotify and go viral on TikTok. That he changes band members because he wants them to be cooler and more surfer. Let him start singing in English. I can already see the ticket prices inflating, the unattainable fee, the Lamborghinis, the IG stories, the merch that sells out on the first date. Do me a favor: don't listen to Michele Alessandri's music. Don't call him at La Prima Estate, at Spring Attitude, at MiAmi. Leave him alone, in the countryside, in the nature reserve, in the biopark, to make polenta in Polenta. Which then ends up getting to its head, it runs out of steam and I don't know what to listen to anymore. Which would also be the thirteenth reason why you shouldn't start.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
