FRANCESCO DE GREGORI - Calypsos

I don't agree with the harsh pannings dealt out to De Gregori over the last decade, nor with the general idea that his last album of any real substance was "Canzoni d'amore" from 1992. It's certainly true that he's settled into a standard with no forward steps, but the poetry has often remained intact, filling out much more "classic" arrangements.

This, then, is the stance I take toward "Calypsos", yet another transitional record that charms, at least in terms of its communicative power. Nothing astonishing, to be clear, but group plays on the evergreen that range from terse titles about life's milestones to stornelli sung in a more nasal voice than ever.

Francesco perhaps unduly uses the subtitle "9 new songs", but he also brings together other "pieces" like last year's, certainly less desert-like and "American", though still with a few scattered gems here and there. His hermetic streak also remains very strong, and in the tracks that beg for a prose rendering it sends out messages open to many interpretations: I'm thinking, for instance, of the words of "In onda", where "I'm going out on air silently… I'm not ashamed, I'm waiting for someone to answer me… My enemy is standing and I see him, laughing, still on the shore, and I look at him and smile at him while my ship goes down…": probably a charge of resignation about the stagnation of the established powers, about the helplessness to act and about everyone's lucid powers of observation. As long as his messages remain so overtly political, I don't think he can cross the threshold into true decline, since he'll always stay true to himself.

The record flows lightly, between piano ballads in the vein of "La canzone dell'amore perduto" ("Cardiologia") and not-too-daring power-pop tracks ("Mayday"), while it tries to snap its usual photograph of a city in the atmospheric "Per le strade di Roma", where "fireflies on the Salaria and streetwalkers on Via Frattina" appear, not forgetting the "kids coming out of school dreaming of becoming a politician or an actor…".

It strikes me as a collection of good b-sides, as if he'd leafed through some old notebook of jottings and touched it up with the "Replay" pen, slipping the figure of the thief into various situations ("In onda", "Per le strade di Roma", "L'amore comunque"), while the Luciferian angel of the title track hypocritically claims not to be one. The average level of the songwriting is scraped to its peaks by the subdued, unhappy, angry tones of someone witnessing a disaster unfolding around him: a bit over the top, that's for sure, but let's call it poetic license. Particularly interesting is the metaphorical use of "La casa", conceived as an imaginative space and a shell for thorny, broken feelings that are nonetheless provisionally hopeful ("I'm building this house… and I'm planting four vines there for September wine, and I'm staking the bet that I'll love you forever…").

The overall musical sensibility is quite minimal, with the exception of the responsorial choruses in "La linea della vita", which play the part of the sweet and wicked soul being discussed. Pretty much only here does the record dare a vaguely ecclesiastical tone, though not a particularly memorable one. Otherwise, as I was saying, the arrangements are almost negligible, as if it were a sermon built on background noise. And that's precisely where the ongoing melodic fatigue (this time, it really is fatigue) of his recent albums stems from: it's also rooted in his preaching anxieties, which are now even greater, if more sophisticated, than in the past.

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12/04/2006