Piano Magic

The remarkably mixed crowd – in terms of age, musical background and familiarity with the band – packing Circolo degli Artisti is already the most faithful litmus test of the stylistic and "genre" versatility of Piano Magic, a band capable, like very few others, of continually reinventing itself while always remaining true to the inspiration and sensibility of Glen Johnson, its leader, singer, lyricist, and original mastermind behind the whole project.

Preceded by a short acoustic set from Ancona's own El Cijo, Piano Magic take the stage in their full, consolidated line-up, which also includes Angèle David-Guillou, immediately tempering the sobriety of their dark clothes with Glen Johnson's subtle irony: he first affects a studied uncertainty when announcing the band's name (understandable, really, given how many projects he juggles, a bit of an identity crisis would hardly be surprising!), and then keeps chatting with the audience throughout the show, recounting anecdotes from previous dates of the Italian tour and generally showing an appreciable knack for not taking himself too seriously.

Small talk aside, it's time to give voice to the impetuous guitars, the dry, steady rhythms of Jerome Tcherneyan, and the unmistakable keyboard washes that have by now become the trademark of much of Piano Magic's recent output. They open strong, with the overwhelming "Recovery Position", during which it sounds truly strange to hear the line "I've been thrown out of Italy and I'll be thrown out again", given the popularity the band has achieved in our country and the many dates scattered across the peninsula during this Italian tour.

The rest of the show sticks firmly to the blueprint laid out by the opener, offering a set list made up mostly of tracks from the last two albums, "Part-Monster" and "Ovations", with a clear preference for the most immediate ones, which allow that blend of guitar-driven dark-wave echoes so evident in the band's recent trajectory to unfold freely. So come, one after another, the twilit but never truly gloomy tones of "The Blue Hour", "Dark Horses", "Incurable" (on which Angèle's slender voice is unfortunately overwhelmed by the roar of the guitars) and "Great Escapes", segued without a break as a long coda to "Love And Music", a genuine emblem of Glen Johnson's artistic vision – he even finds time to joke that the music referenced in the title shouldn't be his own, but rather the "good music" of Kraftwerk, the Cure or Morrissey. Johnson's modesty comes through in his words as much as in his way of relating to music, and through both he makes explicit his tribute to the artists he has always acknowledged as closest to his own sensibility: his thoughts turn to Morrissey's recent illness, to whom "The King Cannot Be Found" is dedicated (enriched by vocal passages in a style that stands as a clear tribute to the great Mancunian artist), while the inspiration and collaboration provided by Brendan Perry and Peter Ulrich on the latest "Ovations" is honoured with a cover of "Advent", which seems to close the circle between artistic expressions only apparently distant from one another, but in fact united by a kindred human sensibility even before a strictly musical one.

After the brief pause before the encore, only Glen returns to the stage, to sing the oldest track performed during the evening, "(Music Won't Save You From Anything But) Silence" (taken from "Writers Without Home"), another manifesto-song of his human philosophy as applied to music. The band joins him shortly after, breaking the intimacy of his voice surrounded by silence to unleash new bursts of the dark electric flood poured over the audience throughout the show, which find their final outlet in the frenzied "On Edge" and in the electronic drums played by Angèle, which – if further proof were needed – complete the intersection of stylistic and temporal planes that Piano Magic now play with consummate mastery.

Perhaps that's why, at the end of the show, someone looks around a little disoriented, wondering whether an evening like this could have taken place in the 80s rather than in 2009. They'll find the answer in the many young faces in the crowd, who may have only discovered Piano Magic through the latest albums and perhaps have never even heard of Dead Can Dance; but above all, they'll find it by making sense of the extraordinary naturalness of Glen Johnson and co.'s inspiration, artists who don't hide their "artistic debts", but who, even live, display a personality light years away from the blandness of so many formulaic, calculated tributes.

(16/11/2009)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google