JANG SENATO - Jang Senato

It's an album that seemed never destined to arrive. Jang Senato were touring around Italy, winning awards, and stirring up the interest of industry insiders with their minimal pop d'auteur, yet they never got around to making the record. Now, three years after their debut at the City Music Lab in Bologna, here it is. A self-produced album that will still have to wrestle a bit with the shackles of distribution. An album full of songs, fifteen of them, that manages the feat of not diluting their compositional skill and their taste for the unexpected, even over the long haul. That was far from a given. All the better.

Jang Senato are one of the entities born from the ashes of Daunbailò, a wild and explosive band of Romagna-style patchanka that, around the middle of the last decade, lasted just long enough to release one remarkable album. Worthy heirs, on a par with Valerio Corzani's Ex (Mau Mau, Mazapegul), who was the eminence grise behind Daunbailò. Today that page has been fully turned, though certain sonic traits remain imprinted, inevitably, in their DNA. Now that they finally have a record to look at themselves in, Jang Senato can truly call themselves a fully formed band. This mirror reflects the image of a tight-knit, talented collective with a clear sense of direction.

Roughly half of the tracks on the album, which bears their name, "Jang Senato" and nothing more, were already known to us. These are the songs they've played live, the ones in rotation on their MySpace, with a few extra nuances added here and there. We already knew "La bomba nucleare", for instance, a sweet, syncopated lullaby that would fit well on a Dente record, if Dente liked to fill his songs with assorted effects and unconventional sounds. We also knew "Respirare" even better, a pop gem in which, live after live, the summa of the Jang Senato philosophy has been concentrated: catchy rhythms and melodies, lyrics that are light yet intelligent. And then "Lamericano", irony and energy in their purest form, probably the moment when Daunbailò's influences are most palpable. "I tempi buoni" is almost a carefree rock steady, somewhere between Silvestri's "Pozzo dei desideri" and a watered-down Sublime, while the Elliott Smith-like "Un tempo" is another of the old war horses, with the usual woman who torments, evoked and mourned but never losing the urge to laugh, bitterly, at oneself.

The opening, in short, is tough: Davide "Gulma" Gulmanelli's dense voice lends substance to a sonic carpet whose textures constantly interweave over the higher notes, the rhythm rising and falling, like the scales blasted out by Alfredo Nuti's guitar in "Lamericano". A sort of manifesto of Jangsenatismo: this is who we are, and this is what we do best. "Io e te", after the background noise of "Dish", moves along the same track as "Respirare", with an airy chorus and a very sixties structure, round and easy, simple yet effective. Then comes the brief and romantic "Agata", a light ballad all little guitars and music box, faintly recalling the old De Gregori of "Chissà dove sei". It may sound like a degregoriana quotation, but perhaps it's just coincidence, as is the opening line of "Ragazzo pulito" ("I'm a clean kid, you say my ears are full of soap"), a lively parable of a modern young man who dreams of Maria De Filippi and Big Brother before coming to his senses, thank goodness, through a simple, great love. Then come the carefree mid-tempos of "La coperta" and "B-Boy", the busy protests of existential and social unease in "Factotum", and the other minimal fragment, "Gli amanti nuovi". "Luoghi comuni" is exactly what its title declares, a parade of platitudes and clichés, which at one point opens up into a refrain full of sounds and a melancholic desire for revenge. It closes with the ballad, of course: "Meno di un treno", ironic and romantic as it could not help but be, swing and stardust.

This album was a coming-of-age exam. For Gulma's songwriting, for the choices in the arrangements, and ultimately for understanding which direction these Jang Senato intended to take. And the exam has been passed. Romagna is fertile ground for the light song, and the five senators come from a groove of tradition that they've wanted to widen, thoroughly dirty up and divert. With a few more narrative devices and some sacrifices in the tracklist, this exam would be passed with flying colours, but even as it stands we come very close. Jang Senato, with their refined and compact songs, have great pop potential, and it would be a shame if they failed to unleash it completely.

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28/06/2010