In times like these, where it seems to have become difficult to maintain concentration in reading for more than a few seconds, it is good to get to the point straight away, right from the first lines. So allow me to make an official statement right at the beginning: Lostatobrado is the best band I've listened to in recent years. In the last two years, in fact, since the date of birth falls in 2023, in Bologna, their center of residence and attraction that is not at all random.
Let's go back to that day when I see myself handed over an audio CD containing some songs together with the request to listen and give an opinion. Few things are more embarrassing, since either what is sought is an interested opinion – therefore with an obligatory dose of sincerity that is a prelude to a possible future job – or one is looking for a generic evaluation, a benevolence that can only be courteous or better still remain silent forever. In this sense, knowing the proposer is a pejorative; we will not be able to hide behind diplomatic answers.
I accept the assignment with a foolish amount of smugness, even if the material that accompanies the CD is curious, and contains images and words that somehow bring me closer. There is a poem, Ode to the hen; there are graphics, where the same hen illuminates the surroundings with a fan of light that recalls the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon; there is a definition, “Post-agricultural electroacoustic music”. Finally a motto: “What has been is wild state”. In short, just enough to put you in a friendly frame of mind. But a hesitation remains, typical of those who have listened to demo tapes to an inconsiderate extent in the past decades and rather than listen to others would change profession, as they are all the same, serial; ultimately useless.
In private I put the CD in the player, and in the meantime I read titles that are equally good: Palletsfor example. Pallets? And who would ever sing about pallets? Then, Goats. Goats? And which Bolognese would ever know how to describe a goat? Of course, there is the risk that it is only an aesthetic fascination towards an unknown, idealized world. But let's listen. The first track – Goodwill – it is interlocutory and short. The second – Palletsprecisely – it keeps you in suspense for a handful of seconds, then it's off. And a bell rings in your head. Attention, says the bell. This is it something. I like. And this voice: I know it. In fact, I recognize it. I already listened to it years ago, in one of the few albums that had impressed me. A group from Garfagnana, Staindubatta, who knows how their album got into my hands: good work. And beautiful land.
I have to contact them, I had thought, but that was the time of Covid madness and the purpose had remained confined to the house together with all human beings. But that voice remained inside me, fascinating and never saccharine, a timbre that cannot be defined or restricted to a classic masculine-feminine-neutral one. Now I hear her singing “Hay that bends, the sun will not raise it again” and “spread out like pallets, spread out like pallets”. Nothing else is needed to let go, these words that come from direct and perhaps irremediably lost experience are perfectly accompanied by the false naivety of a rural self-definition which instead hides a profound ability to maneuver machines and compose something very personal, supported by excellent rhythms and guitars. And as soon as I think I have deciphered the entire sound world from the first three minutes of music, everything changes and other melodies overlap, silencing each other and other sequences define the surprise better.
Then – I think – you can still listen to music. Making music, far from dictatorial majoritarian dynamics. “The sun is an animal that doesn't let you sleep”. I don't believe it, and it seems impossible to listen to the closing of a great single like Goats a refrain no one would dare utter: “You, you, lying in sacred things, like the flowers of summer, and the shit of goats, goats, goats.” You don't believe it. Lying in sacred things. Goat shit. At the end of the album I am grateful to have had this privileged access to lives and panoramas that so explicitly emerge from the ruts. They are landscapes that I know, not only geographical, archaic and immutable and at the same time, through passion and penance, so fully within what we call present.
I therefore thank the names I read on the back cover: Lorenzo Valdesalici, baritone guitar and second voice; Alessio Vanni, vocals, synths, samples; Lorenzo Marra, post-agricultural modular synthesis, live electronics. I discover historical origins that explain many things, the Reggio Emilia Apennines, the Garfagnino side, a Puglia that is always home for the Emilians. And I will discover that they are not improvising musicians or bored students, but graduated soundtrack composers and sound designers. And, existentially speaking, I will find them not at all fierce or furious in their being artists, on the contrary, in possession of an enviable detachment with what they bring to the table. They believe it, and don't show it. They know what else there is in the world.
From that moment on, I never lose sight of them, and the best advice I can give is to do the same. Listening to that first album, Songs against reasonsix tracks not to be missed, an album that will be worth a collector's item in a number of years. And even less to miss, the live performance. Powerful, technically impeccable and never cold, in a balance of a thousand sounds that is masterfully maneuvered and directed from the stage, where all the electronic, guitar and vocal paraphernalia converges towards two unique lines, left and right, for the gratitude of the listeners. For once, the expression “sounds like the album” is not a denigration, since that perfection is accompanied by the speaking movement of the bodies, which are beautiful to look at due to the unusual arrangement they take on the stage, where they arrange themselves without the slightest ostentation. And meanwhile the prizes and recognitions arrive, which Lostatobrado accepts with some hesitation, not because they are due but because – as we were already saying – there is more in the world.
And we arrive at the new album, Alaswhich perhaps I should have reviewed more fully instead of implanting this whole genealogy. Album that amplifies everything that precedes it, more than mature, cultured, full of quotes that can be detected with attentive ears (Pink Floyd, Morricone, Sigur Rós, let's face it, even CSI) but it's even better if you don't look for inspiration, and instead you just listen. The mountain is always there, looming, calling and detaching together, emerging from the notes in the form of bells, horseflies, ancient voices, mezzo-sopranos, geese, horns, a very orderly chaos of sound that dissolves into even more incisive melodies and lyrics. There's nothing like it out there, and if a test were needed I'd recommend one of those songs you listen to on repeat, Pergolas. Song that is not listened to with the ears, but with the skin that rises.
Mountain air also in the black and white cover, the revival of a scene from the chivalric May where about twenty people in unlikely disguises carve out a role, reciting their origins. Excellent artwork, unmissable cover for an LP that has no writing or titles on the front. Like a photo to hang in your home.
I read in the press release that for Lostatobrado “the only thing that really matters on the great and chaotic stage of life is finding your own role to play, discovering your own way of living in the present”. Objective centered. Well done.
The version of the dramatic May on the cover of 'Ahimè'. Yes, the Lion is Massimo Zamboni
