MEZZALA - Il problema di girarsi

…(now) has trouble turning around…

It's a football expression, coined and made famous by the legendary commentator of the Italian national team in the 1980s and 90s, Bruno Pizzul, whom "not-so-young" readers will certainly remember. He used to say it when a talented player, perhaps the greatest of them all, Roberto (Baggio: the only one he granted the poetic license of calling by first name alone), found himself tangled up in the barbed wire of a tight man-marking job, and some flash of genius, some improvised stroke, was needed to put the ball back on the path to the opposing goal. A mantra suspended between fear (of losing the ball) and expectation (of one of those sublime moments that only this game can deliver, worth an entire match, sometimes an entire existence). Read in light of these very first years of the 2010s, however, it's also a clever metaphor for the condition of (so-called) Italian alternative music, and more broadly for that of an entire country (its younger generations especially), forced to make do in a socio-economic and cultural situation that gets worse by the year, and to keep inventing some rhapsodic change of pace, some impossible dribble, in the hope of staying afloat and maybe "finding the back of the net" again.

At least that seems to be how Michele Bitossi sees it — better known as the lead voice of the band Numero 6 — who for his solo debut chose that very phrase as the title, along with the stage name Mezzala. With a healthy dose of irony and lightness, Mezzala uses the sporting metaphor, particularly meaningful in a country where football is all too often both mirror and heterogenesis of everything else, to sketch a disenchanted portrait of himself and of his times. Without falling into self-pity, populism or any kind of doom-mongering, in short, and never taking himself too seriously. A lyrical vein that's at once brilliant, mocking and crepuscular, also reflected in the highly handcrafted quality and the variety of musical ideas packed into this album.

Mezzala's songwriting departs somewhat from that of Bitossi's better-known band, gaining an elegant pop breadth thanks to the extended, refined interplay between Tristan Martinelli's very vintage keyboards (synth and piano) and the (electro-acoustic) guitars of Mattina Cominotto and Bitossi himself, with the often disorienting shifts and pauses of the rhythm section (Giulio Gaietto on bass and Nicola Magri on drums) lending it vigor and bite.

The concept unfolds across the central chapters, which evoke a certain "liberty-style" and libertarian (though not politicized) singer-songwriter tradition of the late '70s (Graziani, Camerini, Fortis), revisited with a slight "Baustelle-esque" aftertaste: the solitary, melodic euphoria of "Arance Dal Balcone" and of the lead single "La Vasca Coi Piranha", the introverted eroticism of "Ortica", the italian job-style paradoxical comedy worthy of Marco Ferreri in "Un Progetto Come Un Altro", the trumpet (courtesy of Luca Guercio) and the restless gait of "Ritrovare Il Gol". But Mezzala also knows how to ad-lib and improvise variations on a theme, like the delightful italo-disco/wave of "Che Fine Faremo?", which closes with a solemn 1980s-Battiato-style choir ("Che fine faremo? Che fine farò?") immediately deflated by the most prosaic sarcasm ("Di merda!"); the jagged, crumpled melody almost reminiscent of Jeff Mangum on "Cose Che Ho Visto"; the spare, moving semi-acoustic recollection of his father in "Hey Pa"; and the brisk, Anglophile indie-pop of "Tempi E Modi", driven along by a magnificent guitar jangle.

With a splendid Marseille roulette, Mezzala manages to take out half the opposing defence, and scoring now looks like a walk in the park for him. Unless he decides to deliberately blast it wide, for the sake of honesty and invective, the way another great anarchic figure did many years ago, exposing a fixed match in front of his own fans (and to think that even today some people still pretend to be shocked): the footballer-poet Ezio Vendrame (a close friend of Piero Ciampi, not by chance). If you send me to the stands, I'm delighted. Or rather, as Mezzala would put it, "you need discipline to go with the talent, otherwise just sit on the bench." Luckily, here there's no shortage of either one.

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02/01/2012