Umberto Maria Giardini

"Toglimi, come va tolta la carie dai denti". Heard live, this line from "Quasi Nirvana", the first single taken from "La Dieta dell'Imperatrice" (La Tempesta Dischi, 2012), takes on a broader significance than just dental advice applied to unrequited love. A generational outsider, the artist formerly known as Moltheni (he wouldn't appreciate being called that, so...) seems instead to be staking out his own pained estrangement from the dominant, mopey indie scene. Umberto Giardini had already said as much, in the pages worth reading of La Repubblica's XL supplement, to fellow journalist Mauro Petruzziello: "I'm convinced Moltheni had run his course. The project had slipped into certain mechanisms, typical of the Italian indie scene, that I no longer liked". So the deepest need was to purify himself by stepping out of the picture; an "unpleasant" voice within a scene that's perfect but also thoroughly distorted.

The difference on a human level is tangible. We'd seen him suffocated by hysterical fandom and fees too high for his own good, both of which had corroded his spirit; we'd then found him gasping for air in Pineda, layering his search for new identities; today we find Umberto Maria Giardini reborn. The instrumentals "L'Imperatrice" and "Il Desiderio Preso per la Coda" capture his transitional phase well, but the focal point remains him, U. Giardini (as it was written under "Nutriente" at the Sanremo festival he took part in back in 2000): fiercely idealistic and, for that very reason, forever let down by the mediocrity around him. Curled in on himself during the electric guitar openings, or facing the wall. Isolationist and a man of few words. But compared to the past, the music itself seems to gain ground over tales of love gone wrong. With a voice now tremulous, now powerful, the singer dressed in red seems more concerned with the closeness between sound and word than between word and meaning.

Amid psychedelic echoes and new-generation progressive rock (Steven Wilson docet, more than post-rock), and the drowsy-afternoon songwriting of another Umberto (Palazzo, "Il Trionfo dei Tuoi Occhi"), there are plenty of intentional and unintentional references that catch you off guard. That's why the forty-four-year-old from the Marche region finally seems to be having fun again, and not just despairing, in a way we hadn't seen from him in years.

The band backing him, with keyboards standing in for bass, seems fully aware of his new outlook on the world. So if once upon a time everyone would go off and do their own thing, paying scant attention to nuance, while he was too caught up reliving his own emotional hang-ups to worry about tidy arrangements, now there are moments where you're struck by the cohesion between the parts and by Umberto's maturity as a composer. Even when he pulls out of the hat an "In Porpora" that we'd rarely heard sound so clean and moving. Written by him, of all people, the crooked loser par excellence.

The crowd, which has turned out in force, seems to be breathing it all in, as if celebrating his rebirth. When the lights go up, you can spot plenty of men and women who've come straight from work mixing in with university students wearing Sonic Youth t-shirts. A few sweat-drenched teenagers dot the room, while Marco Giallini sways along to the beat, rounding out a scene that could pass for an ad about the kind of crowd you sometimes find at concerts. And if Rumore's pop-rock ideologue, Maurizio Blatto, once said of Il Teatro degli Orrori: "When there are girls packing the room, it means success has arrived" — and indeed that's exactly the case here — we'd be curious to hear his take on what's just been described.

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