MAU MAU - Dea

Mau Mau (after the name of the Kenyan independence movement that arose in 1948, ed.) is the post-Loschi Dezi project of Luca Morino, Fabio Barovero and Bienvenu Nsongan, based in Turin. Across their albums (starting with the landmark "Sauta Rabel", 1992, preceded by the mini-album "Soma la Macia", and running up to the 2001 compilation "Marasma General"), the band has gradually consolidated and refined their place - already very clear from the start - within Italian rock. Amid programmatic intent, musical and extra-musical projects (frontman Morino's notable work in film and literature is worth mentioning, alongside the parallel projects Banda Ionica and Banda Maulera), and artistic-cultural contaminations, Mau Mau's patchanka arrives at "Dea".

With dialect intrusions now definitively expunged, Morino and company knowingly give themselves over to Afro-Cuban calls ("Dea"), to the folk-minimalist accordions of Tiersen and to brash, Bregovic-esque horns ("Mia macchina Mercedes" and "Il treno del sole"), to the sly serenades of Conte ("Cartoline"), Brazilian-style rhythmic attacks ("Cannibal"), right through to Shaggy-oriented dub-posse rock ("La casa brucia"). Everything is in order, everything geared toward summer-festival danceability, polished too by a few touches of electronics in post-production: witness the accordion riff that opens "Da qui ai Caraibi", or "Cannibal" itself, or the lounge keyboards of "Can anrabià", or the sparse reworkings of the closing "Bentornata nel campo", built on a bossa-dub base with Manu Chao/Africa Unite-style blends.

What doesn't work is the easygoing atmosphere, overly fond of cheap, ultra-simplistic folk ditties, or Morino's singing, which now sounds like a robot set irreversibly to melodic (tedious) rhythmic-mechanical declamation. What was a strength on previous albums becomes a nagging flaw here, a potential trigger for utter collapse. Patching up the gap is an intruder that contradicts the spirit of these careless Midases: technology. "La casa brucia" features the loose-limbed shape-shifting of Don Rico and Terron Fabio (Sud Sound System), while "Can anrabià" gets a boost from Latin American freestyler Calixto.

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24/06/2006