The human body vol. 1: After the serious bicycle accident, an album that makes you think and dance:: the reviews of Ondarock

You are my days and my nights
You are in my momentum and remorse
You are the penalty that chains me when I miss you
And even when you are with me, I miss you, I miss you

Every now and then Jovanotti returns, even if the best of his career now seems remotely passed off. The years of the hip-hop Gascon and ramshackle led to the great success of the mid-nineties, then to the world enthusiasts of the zero years and to the funk-electro-pop turbines of the years immediately following. He released a lot, Jovanotti, between study albums, live, compilations and often his albums have put together different musical worlds. The “Backup – Lorenzo 1987-2012” collection (2012) is a good starting point for those who do not want to get lost in an endless production, not always supported by effective choices. Whether it is, regardless of what he thinks whoever writes you, Jovanotti is a superstar in Italian music and a lucky boy has now become an intergenerational name that holds together very different public, often gathered in colorful concerts-event. The audience loves Jovanotti, even if he has been artistically tired for a long time, so much so that after “The Sun Disco” (2022) he decided to take a break. A bad bicycle accident in Santo Domingo, which ironically combines perfectly with the public image cultivated over the years, led him to reflect on the body and return for his sixteenth (!) Study album.

“The human body Vol. 1” is a naive album, as is often its author, and which combines songwriters, supported by an uncertain vocality, with contemporary productions signed by Dardust, Michele Canova and Federico Nardelli. Sliding towards superficial wisdom is still a frequent threat to the texts, but it is his way of doing poetry: half banality, half intuition. It would be said, barely altering a tired formula, that many songs make it dance but also reflect, as is the case of “Montecristo”, a philosophical reggaeton, or “outlaw”, a political funk. Worse when it slips into the pathetic of the piano ballad “A world apart” or in the tearful one of the “the airplane” diaristic, in the childish nursery rhyme “Without if and without but”, in the reflective chamber of chamber of “great to be frightened” or in dozen pop-rocks as “in love and free” and “101”. Better not to listen to the lyrics too carefully, in fact the songs shine where the good productive work prevails, such as that done by Dardust for “Universe”, an electronic orgy with folk loans, or the final “the human body”, which evolves from a Sirtaki to make it a barderia Edm that more Jovanotti cannot be.

At low laps Jovanotti discovers songwriting and, even closing an eye on the very limited vocal performance, it expires too often in the banal, in the navel, in the pathetic. The accident, but also the age that advances, however force him to curb his contagious, albeit riskyly cloying enthusiasm, entrusting him above all to the producers. We obtain a first volume of fifteen songs in which none seems to be able to aspire to enter his best songbook and which will act above all as a pretext for new, torrential, live performances.

17/04/2025