SANTO BARBARO - Mare Morto

"A free project of words, images, music". A small booklet containing poems and photos, telling the story of a war. A war between man and the Earth, between man and that which, within man, belongs to the Gods. This is, first and foremost, "Mare Morto" by the Emilian band Santo Barbaro.

Then the music arrives: a crepuscular indie-folk, laden with a smoky pathos, almost standoffish in the way it tells us of a "war in a time that despises time / in this land that promises lands" ("Guerre"). A folk in which the lyrics conjure precise images, yet can still be read on multiple levels. The "Nero Deserto", then, isn't just that of the "poor victims of circumstance", but also the one in which "the hell of the living" sets about processing "our dreams".

The tradition of "committed" songwriting thus lives on in these tracks, built with the wonder of little: minimal piano lines, soporific jazzy moods (as in the pensive "Cara Mia Patria"), and Middle Eastern scents ("Occhi immensi").

Everything seems well calibrated, fairly polished in its details, though over time the record ends up feeling a touch cramped, almost unable to say everything it had to say, so much so that, all too often, rather than chasing the words through evocation, the music ends up crushed under their iconic weight: an "extreme" case in point is the long-winded title track, which seems to want to sum up all the moods and emotions of a well-made record, one that's still not quite good enough to go beyond a thoroughly deserved pass mark.

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19/11/2008