LEBOWSKI - Propaganda

After the splash made by “The Best Love Songs”, Lebowski return with “Propaganda”, making a half-hearted attempt to adopt a more conventional rock-combo line-up, while actually losing themselves in demented tangents (admittedly in a sometimes rather cloying way) and aiming for new-wave oleography even more directly than before, something that on the debut was only one strand of the tangle.

For instance, the chaotic rhythmic pastiche of “Giovanni Citofonista” sits awkwardly with the sing-song pop vocal, which by comparison sounds extremely weak; the same goes for “Avevo un Sogno nel Cassonetto”, where the scenario shifts yet again (a syncopated dub in noir guise), and “Mutatis Mutande”, on paper an anthem in the shape of a war dance and a restless saraband. Overall, the excessive emphasis on the crude grimaces of the lyrics, at times vulgar, distracts from the music, which is instead genuinely demented.

The band does however let off some firecrackers that show the linguistic and stylistic Babel is still well within their grasp. “Sei Uno Sprovveduto”, triple-speed synth-pop, with overtones of “Transmission” by Joy Division and nods to the B52’s, an increasingly Luciferian atmosphere, multilingual vocals (even snippets of immigrant speech), could well be a new classic of Italian dark wave.

“Job Fighters II”, another creative rhythm, is an anthem delivered in a conversational tone (for its primitive, childlike assonance rather than any real semantic sense) with a sinuous little guitar line reminiscent of Captain Beefheart. “Bang! Shit! Styling!”, a techno-pop locomotive with fresh linguistic non-sense, is the moment that comes closest to the best method of Cccp.

What really shines, more than the non-structure of the non-songs, are above all the arrangements, unrestrained when not downright cacophonous, as in “Kansas City”, a chant of stammering robots over a disco-funk beat (“That’s the Way I Like It” by KC & The Sunshine Band), surrounded by hallucinogenic, hypnotic electronic events, and “Mattia Pascal”, a ska-core ramalama with electronic hissing, a sort of “Modern Dance” for swaggering entertainers. “Rosso Shocking”, on the other hand, is more self-satisfied with its calligraphic confusion (it even attempts a macabre jam with filtered sax).

From the acclaimed firm of Franconi-Re-Mancini-Latini, rounded out to a quintet by Nicola “Nico” Amici (sax player of Butcher Mind Collapse), whose closing credit cheekily echoes Velvet Underground & Nico, comes a hilariously inventive record, uninhibited to the point of blurring genre boundaries with every trick in the book. There's great, almost systematic care taken in the alien yet thoroughly earthbound, everyday distortion of sounds, voices and vocal blends. Production, plus scattered backing vocals, by “Ragno” Favero, with warbling turns from Claudia Cingolani on “Sei Uno Sprovveduto”. Mastered by Giovanni Versari.

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15/01/2013