I Cani

Almost nobody's still listening to I Cani's album, but you find them everywhere all the same, from Repubblica to Grazia to Topolino. That's the essential message going around lately whenever people find themselves, for the umpteenth time in recent months, discussing this one-man band that becomes a full five-piece live outfit on stage. It was, however, fairly predictable that things would turn out this way: whether you like it or not, the album manages to describe a well-defined slice of social reality with real concreteness and realism, drawing in those who belong to that world while intriguing everyone else, who obviously take longer to catch on to songs that nonetheless came out of the underground. And now that more and more people are letting themselves be won over by their debut album, I Cani are racking up sellouts all over Italy, with the show at Tunnel being no exception, precisely because these songs now belong to far more people than the crowd that turned up at Mi Ami for their very first live show ever.

Let's start right away with the doubts raised by the opening act, namely Cris X, who had already contributed to the album. His brief set of electronic noise experiments is about as far as you can get from the immediacy of I Cani's repertoire, and bearing in mind what we just said about the widening fanbase of Niccolò and co.'s project, it was extremely predictable that by the second track a good number of people in attendance would already be booing and shouting insults. It's hard to understand what an artist gets out of performing in a situation bound to create a hostile atmosphere toward him, and Niccolò's reaction is equally baffling: he scolds the crowd, saying in no uncertain terms: "I find it disgusting when people boo the opening act, like at a Vasco Rossi concert." Once you've managed to make an album capable of speaking to so many people, this is the most natural side effect in the world, and it should simply be accepted without complaint.

I Cani run through, in an inevitably short set, all the songs from the album plus a cover of "Con Un Deca" by 883. There's a rhythm section made up of bass and drums, plus three keyboards/synths, including Niccolò's own. In our review we had highlighted the punk streak running through I Cani's synth pop, but live the place where it comes through most is the frontman's voice, far more aggressive than on the studio versions, giving way to genuine shouted moments that increase as the minutes go by. The sound of the instrumental side, on the other hand, is almost too precise: presumably they didn't want to roughen it up and thicken it too much for fear of smothering the vocals, but as a result it lacks the dynamism and bite needed to give the whole thing real live impact. And that impact still doesn't arrive even when the tempo picks up and the volume is cranked up enough to blast the audience's ears: live impact is something else entirely, and right now I Cani simply don't have it. Certain nuances are missing too: where the lightness of "Wes Anderson" could be exploited, the performance instead comes across as too rigid and flat, whereas they do manage to strike the right balance on "Il Pranzo Di Santo Stefano". For the rest, as we know, the songs don't differ all that much from one another in strictly musical terms, so the same observations made above can be extended to all of them, including the cover mentioned.

Down at the foot of the stage, "as is only natural," it's all singalongs, clapping, sweat and bodies in constant motion, with moments that come close to a pogo pit. After all, the songs aren't played brilliantly, but they're not played badly either, and the timeless appeal of a crowd coming together to sing along to songs that, just a few months ago, were the almost exclusive listening habit of each person there still hits home, sparking a reaction that clearly goes beyond the merits of whoever's on stage. And let's be clear, there's nothing wrong with any of this: if in the space of an hour people burned through 225,000 tickets for Stone Roses knowing perfectly well that the singer can't sing and the guitarist and drummer haven't played together in at least a decade, there's really no reason to object if, on some twenty occasions, a few hundred people have fun to the tune of catchy, well-crafted songs even when the performance barely rises above the basics.

It closes with Niccolò diving into the paying, pogoing crowd and shouting "igruppihipsterindiehardcorepunkelectropop I Cani". And that's just fine: I Cani's live show right now is anything but memorable, but it's not a scam purely designed to fleece money out of fans blinded by devotion to the album either. For all its room to improve, it already has what it takes to give audiences a good time.

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