Il Lungo Addio - A Noir on the Romagna Coast

The recording career of Milan-based musician Fabrizio Testa began in the early 2010s with a handful of singles, before splitting into two separate and quite different projects. The first, released under his own name, has evolved over the years into decidedly experimental territory, with a different set of collaborating musicians on each LP. The second, under the name Il Lungo Addio, sees him as the creative force behind a band completed by bassist Luca Ciffo (Fuzz Orchestra, The Great Saunites, Traum), drummer Paolo Mongardi (Zeus!, Fuzz Orchestra), later replaced by Fabrizio Carriero (Nickelodeon), and trumpeter Sergio Montemagno. Over the course of fifteen years, this quartet has explored a highly original and deeply personal brand of unconventional singer-songwriter music, inspired by the towns of the Romagna coastline. 

The name of the project already says a lot: while clearly nodding to Raymond Chandler's classic noir, it's also the perfect phrase to describe the characters the songwriter imagines, forever caught between a life made of repetitive gestures and looming depression — in other words, a long goodbye that always hovers just ahead of one's thoughts, yet never quite materializes, except, as we'll see, in the imagination. Fabrizio Testa turns the seaside resort into a non-place inhabited by men wandering — between boredom and despair — in search of a truth they'll never find.

Once again, the subject of modern Italian singer-songwriter music is the solitary man (as in Emidio Clementi, Cesare Basile or Giovanni Succi, for instance), unable to find his place in a society that measures a person's worth by their income, and who — in the case of Romagna — loses himself in lonely nights in decaying hotels, among mosquitoes, campsites and love affairs doomed to fail. If the common thread running through every album released as Il Lungo Addio is this Romagna universe, a close cousin to the desolation of Hopper's paintings or Luigi Ghirri's photographs, the music, on the other hand, keeps changing from album to album, while always holding onto a single connecting thread.

The project was born in 2010, and the recordings from its first three years can be found on Disperate abitudini (2013), a collection that already contains much of Testa's poetics, albeit in a still bare-bones, stripped-down version of the doomed singer-songwriter. The first true LP is Pinarella Blues (2014), which uses a parched blues bordering on post-punk to tell the stories of lives along the Romagna coast. The deconstructed "Arcipelago Zadina" is the most experimental track, while "Pinarella Blues", with its bluesy gait and its bassline, can be considered emblematic of the debut. Post-punk elements surface in "Agosto", which sums up much of the universe the band has built, while "L'ultima fotografia" foreshadows the tales of lonely men endlessly searching for loves lost for no reason. 

Fuori stagione (2016) leans further into melody, drawing closer to the sound of Italian indie. The trumpet enriches the arrangements and will remain a permanent, inseparable element of Fabrizio Testa's project from here on.

The filtered vocals of "Fuori stagione" sound unmistakably indie, while sadness and irony coexist in "Una tedesca" (set to a vibraphone melody) and in the tales of the resort's eccentric characters ("Il presidente"). The folk ballad "Dentro al blu" foreshadows a hypothetical ending in a sea that stands as the only alternative to the grey-black of society.

As clear as Fabrizio Testa's ideas are, it still takes a while longer to achieve full focus, and Tutti nuotammo a stento (2018), which quotes Fabrizio De André, marks a decent step forward. The title underscores the author's philosophy, the constant struggle of living and of finding moments of genuine happiness amid prevailing hedonism. The record moves from sounds even more stripped-down than on the earlier releases ("Il mare d'inverno") to the pleasant melodies of "Astrid", still carried by dry, minimal guitars. The title track is the most poetic moment, a fresh meditation on death softened by the persistent trumpet enriching the guitar rhythms that dominate virtually every song, from the potential hit "Marina di Ravenna" to the vintage blues of "Vu Cumprà" to the folk ballad "Fa freddo anche d'estate". That same year, he found one of his finest melodies yet in the single "Riviera New Wave", a disenchanted duet with singer Linda Carcione.

Violent Summer (2020) has everything it needs to be the project's perfect synthesis. This time there's an attempt at change, namely writing songs with genuine hit potential. The chosen path is pop-rock, and of its seven tracks, it's fair to say at least five could, in a truly open record market, have reached and won over a very wide audience. It plays almost like a CD-book, full of stories of men lost in timeless non-places trying to piece their lives back together (a hotel room, a campsite tent, a deserted pine grove in autumn). One bassline and we're into "Camping", a pop song perfectly balanced between trumpet and guitar, with disenchanted lyrics about a nudist holiday in which all that's left to do is acknowledge a love now over, followed by reflections on life's illusions — a metaphor for the illusory pursuit of happiness in those long-awaited summer holidays.

"Cattolica" is perhaps the perfect song, an absolute hit that voices the desire to escape a narrow, provincial reality that would probably resurface identical anywhere else. The chords of "Hotel Hawaii", with a vocal sample taken from a film featuring Enrico Maria Salerno, serve as a paradigm for the inability of men and women to communicate once it becomes clear that love is over, just as every summer is destined to give way to autumn. The effective metaphor of love as a tennis match, where nothing is constant or graspable and everything is brief and fleeting, is beautifully rendered in the poetic, nostalgic "Tennis", which reflects on the idea that true happiness lies in the memory of childhood. "Ferragosto ok", with hints of britpop and 60s melodies, still carries Testa's philosophy, caught between melancholy goodbyes and the anguished, obligatory fun of summer.

The album closes with "Windsurf", the saddest and perhaps the most genuine track: a brief meditation on death, which stands constantly at our side, almost as if it were our only faithful companion. Then again, dying on one's own windsurf board would hardly be the worst possible way to go. An album with enormous potential, undercut — just a month after its release — by the arrival of Covid, which forced the cancellation of the planned tour. 

The following years were hard, and Tropico romagnolo (2022) is their bitter fruit, fully revealing this long stretch of exhaustion, loneliness and dreams that have faded into nothing. The album sounds like a farewell to the coastline, to the sea, to the mosquitoes, the campsites and the hotel rooms that had so strongly marked all the previous records. If the memory of the past, of a happy childhood or a lost love affair, has always been at the center of Il Lungo Addio's work, now everything seems more distant and unrecognizable, almost like a beach wrapped in fog. The album is marked by sound stripped down to the bare essentials — take "Pizza in albergo", a track built on percussion over which jabs of keyboard and noise are layered, initially almost sounding like a nod to Suicide, before a hypnotic, childlike melody emerges from the percussion, accompanied by synths, and is finally torn apart by industrial noise that wipes out any possible memory.

The idea of a man wandering through a life whose purpose he has never understood is fully present in the pairing of "Nel pomeriggio" and "Porto Canale", spare poetic songwriting (voice, keyboard and bass) somewhere between Lucio Battisti and Death In June, where solitude and the sea are the only cure for an unbearable weariness of life ("Vado al mare così mi passa anche la voglia di morire").

Amid the usual walks filled with reading the same old newspaper, the urge to leave without knowing where to go, actions repeated out of habit that bring no happiness, trips back home followed by outings to buy cigarettes, and the weariness of living with a woman he no longer loves, Fabrizio Testa clearly maps out the setting in which this sonic album/film unfolds.

Adriatico (2024) is a new, particularly unexpected variation on the project, catapulting us into a different sonic world, as the first album where electronics and synths prevail over everything else, churning out darkwave sounds over tribal percussion.

Although everything here looks different, there's obviously no shortage of the common thread running through all the project's albums: the Romagna setting, with men wandering through this small, desolate universe, between Misano, Rimini and Cattolica, in search of an unattainable truth, of a reason not to die, chasing after "Dio e una minerale". This time, though, the lyrics become words thrown into the void, slogans repeated over a backdrop of percussion, simple hotel names set to obsessive kraut rhythms, like deconstructed streams of consciousness. We're no longer looking at short stories about men moving through a micro-world, but rather at photographic snapshots, instants that seem to last forever, as in a Hopper painting.

"Zimmer" hurls hotel names like stiletto blows into an electronic sea of kraut rhythms, almost like random thoughts in a lost mind, evoking the golden age of synth-pop. "Giugno Luglio Agosto Nero" quotes "Luglio, agosto, settembre (nero)" from Area's debut, and is pure darkwave, from the synths to the post-punk bass sound. The passion for Italian cinema - which has always marked Il Lungo Addio - returns in the closing track, "Dove cadono tutti", once again built on synths and percussion, but this time alienating ones, featuring Monica Vitti's words taken from one of the greatest masterpieces of Italian cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni's "Deserto Rosso".

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