If you want to be everything you must not try to become something
The Black Prince is back. Valerio Zecchini in Bologna is like Fantozzi's Folagra: beware of spending too much time in his company, compromise is around the corner. Will be. With the undersigned he has always got the tones, topics and pronouns right: I make it enough.
Dismissed as a low-grade provocateur (a definition that would swell him with pride), Zecchini is indeed a polemicist along the lines of Jonathan Swift or Karl Kraus, a stentorian voice of mockery rather than dissent, a bitter mocker of a West whose decadence bewitches him and captivating. An slavish follower of the Zappa-McLaren doctrine, well aware of the need not to take himself seriously, he has erected a fierce multimedia speculation on the “post-contemporary” belief, complete with gadgets and mottos from the nihilistic I Ching: aphorisms ready-to-wear like “Living is a shame” or “If fate is against us, the worse for him” have become popular in the virtual living rooms that matter.
Having broken the Malaysian captivity that has long relegated him to the shadows (“How I miss the mystical solitude of life in skyscrapers”, he sighs nevertheless), he has pebbles in his boots to stone half of Europe. In this latest assault breviary, the most organic one declaimed so far, he spares no expense: he proclaims himself “supreme shaman of dance and combat literature” and in the title he glances at the post-ideological milkshakes of Ernst Jünger and Guillaume Faye.
To support him, the usual associates (Luca Oleastri's Arab Strap-ian electronics, i treatment exotics of Roberto Passuti, the diving lacerations of the fallen Dario Parisini, to whom the album is dedicated) but also some freshly recruited armigers (the insistent cello of Antonello Manzo in the futurist sonata “Avamposto”). The package is completed by four signature polaroids, confirming the impetus of a total artist.
Some old ones in the repertoire anthemsometimes distorted (the alienating make-up dungeon synth of “Heimat”, “Your putrid existences are not worth a penny” and his dirty psychedelia in the smell of Screaming Trees), sometimes untouched (“Bob Marley was a bad person”, post-contemporary psalm par excellence).
What seizes, however, are the new, poisonous invectives, supported by a musical lexicon that has never been so rich: “The day of a neurasthenic” transplants Dino Campana into an aquatic ethno-jazz, between sample enigmatics and organ at Bad Seeds; “Kuala Lumpur Nailed Nostalgia”, proposed in two versions, is dance-punk from coitus interruptuswho rages over the corpse of the Doobie Brothers; “Paseo por el lado salvaje en Barcelona '92” wallows in opalescent new age. More canonically “Zecchinian”, however, the post-rock of “Palingenesi tardiva” and the Ebm of “Pellegrini dell'internozione”.
Extrapolating one verse rather than another would do harm to the rest of the poem, but if you really have to choose, it's difficult to shake off those “dying pelicans found in the Turkish bath of the gym near your house”.
A scourge of customs with his fingers crossed behind his back and his tongue pressed against his cheek, Zecchini remains among the finest and most fearsome grumblers. As for the suspicious detractors, they don't know what they're missing.
And the majorettes of the silent majority sang in chorus: 'Everyone gets what they deserve!'
09/30/2024
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
