ELIO E LE STORIE TESE - Studentessi

The most incredible thing about the new album by Elio e le Storie Tese is that it comes out almost twenty years after their legendary 1989 debut. Do you realize that? Twenty years, Pink Floyd territory, dinosaur-of-rock stuff. And yet it feels like only yesterday that we discovered "John Holmes" and "Cara ti amo"… So it's only natural and understandable that the Elii have mellowed a bit, ending up as part of the very system they'd originally crashed into like a runaway shard, like unmanageable saboteurs. A dozen years ago they upended every rule of the Sanremo Festival; today they host the Dopofestival.

They're back in the studio a full five years after "Cicciput", an album that had left many music fans puzzled (OndaRock included), though not their die-hard following. Between the two records came an intense run of live activity, all documented on the now-famous cd brulé, those "instant" CDs recorded live on the spot, burned immediately onto disc and sold right after the show*. Plus, of course, countless side projects. Now comes "Studentessi", which seems like an improvement on its predecessor, though it's no miracle.

The lyrics on too many songs are content to be merely cute, without any bite. They're more good-natured, and probably a fair bit less funny. Not that this has to be a bad thing in itself: being Elio e le Storie Tese doesn't mean you're obligated to be funny. It's just that every so often the wheels spin without catching. Sure, the clever ideas are still there, and the band can really land a punch when they decide to go on the attack, as on the single "Parco Sempione". Calling the top brass of the Lombardy Regional government "sons of bitches" is no small thing these days, and it comes at the close of a track that denounces the near-fraudulent conduct of the administration that razed the Gioia woods to the ground.

Among the "lighter" lyrics, meanwhile, special mention goes to "Heavy Samba" (both words and structure brimming with brilliant ideas) and the vaudeville/metal suite "Suicidio a Sorpresa", in which we discover that death-metal tracks, when played backwards, contain messages like "put your sweater on" and "you're as sweet as honey", or at worst insults like "go to hell".

The music is, as ever, so varied that it ends up scattered. There are countless tributes and direct references to the history of Italian popular song, folded into the familiar blend of styles and genres that is the band's trademark. But on the instrumental side, as always, they operate at a level of real excellence. Just take a track like "La risposta dell'architetto", a rap entrusted to Mangoni, which has little to envy in the skills of the undisputed champions of played hip-hop, the Roots. Or the instrumental intro to "Plafone", which recalls certain passages from the Genesis of their glory days, before, at the two-minute mark, Antonella Ruggiero climbs to heights humanly unimaginable unless you happen to be Kate Bush.

We also love the bossa nova/heavy metal dichotomy of "Heavy Samba", which boasts a fine performance from Irene Grandi and closes with a pre-finale that's pure Elio e le Storie Tese. "La lega dell'amore" we'd already heard during the short tour with Claudio Bisio, while "Gargaroz" is the full-length version of the jingle from an ad for a well-known artichoke-based bitter that starred the band. And "Single", the theme tune of the old radio show of the same name, is another sweet tribute to the much-missed Feiez.

The overall impression, decidedly unusual for a band of forty-somethings who've been around for over twenty-five years, is that they could be doing a lot more, and that there's still room for major improvements. We'll see what happens over the next twenty years.

*It's probably just a personal theory, but after attending several of their shows I'm starting to get the feeling that the practice, excellent in theory, of the cd brulé is having a negative effect on the band's live performance.

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28/02/2008