ASSALTI FRONTALI - Mi sa che stanotte

Rap is language, the microphone is the weapon, words are the bullets. Facing the new album, the sixth of a 16-year career, this is what comes to mind, and the cover art in a way helps make the point: it's a reference to the famous photo of Malcolm X holding a rifle, captioned "by any means necessary," the means provided for by the Constitution. In our case, we find Assalto Frontale with a microphone in place of the rifle, but with the same scrutinizing gaze on reality.

Ultimately, reality and society have always been rap's core subjects, with politics as the wild variable, because you're always militant - before, now, after. Assalti Frontali also made national newspaper headlines a while back, the subject of an investigation on terrorism charges, wiretapped and followed because back in the fiery Eighties they'd had contact with Red Brigades terrorist Mario Galesi.

Assalti Frontali and the new Red Brigades: that's the title and that's the story told in "Che stress i Ros", a chronicle of the year the Roman crew lived dangerously. For the record, it should be said the group walked out of the courtroom clean. The experience struck a nerve with Militant A and co., enough to spark a journey backwards, a reflection travelling between past and present, starting from the origin, from where it all began. We relive the years of after-school community centres, seaside trips with their girlfriends, squatted buildings and early political marches ("Ribelli a vita"). At 18, once emancipation has begun, everyone tries to work out their own reason for living: the values of family and the upbringing received are reconsidered within the new environment being built around oneself, accepting and absorbing new experiences, new trajectories to set off from. Assalti Frontali set off, and remain, "Dall'altra parte" (the track uses basketball as a paradigm for life), on the side of those who have always stood against a system (whatever it may be), of those who defended rights against abuses, whether clouded (given the era) or driven by an ideal of equality.

A dissolute life, always on the edge of legality, always carries with it the paranoid feeling of being at the end of the line, of having reached the end of a life of crime and the start of a new one behind bars ("Mi sa che stanotte"). Sometimes, though, fate is strange: it's not the illegal squats or the ever-protesting voices, but a far more damning accusation that unsettles the group: Assalti Frontali, as mentioned, ended up on a list of names of unsuspected people, guilty of aiding terrorist organizations. We'll leave it to Militant A to tell his own version of events in "Che stress i Ros", and we'll just add that it's a perfectly old-school track with booming bass.

On that note, last year we noted an old-school hip-hop resurgence overseas (Edan above all with his "Beauty And The Beat"), and the leading figures of Italian rap didn't pass up the chance to dig out of some ideal record collection those damn Eighties sounds, like the heavy guitar riffs straight out of Run DMC ("I miei amici sono strani").

The wild card is "Gaia per davvero", a genuine campfire song out of place and out of everything; a tribute to a friend who passed away - and that's how we'll take it - a big acoustic ballad for guitar and voice, just melancholy enough, just mischievous enough.

We close with "Si può fare così", a rhetorical question about the state of music, and about alternative ways of making it, and we do so with Militant A's own words:

"fatti pure il mio cd masterizzato — solo un pezzo? —

ma tutto il disco in qualsiasi formato

in mp3 o fai un po' te

se c'hai l'originale è pure meglio per me

my copyright is a blackberry pie

non me lo difende mica quella brutta faccia d'ispettore,

capirai il copyright

noi: Get up, stand up for i nostri right"

Having set off for Bergamo, where they laid down the groundwork for the tracks on "Mi sa che stanotte", and then washed up for six months at the Turin studios Casasonica belonging to Subsonica (who flavour the album's tracks with their by-now overused signature sound), Assalti Frontali deliver the most poetic and political album of their career.

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

19/07/2006