ENSI - Clash

I used to sell records out of the trunk, I know how the carousel turns

This bar alone would be enough to introduce and describe “Clash”, the latest album by Jari Ivan Vella, aka Ensi, released in February 2019 on Warner Music Italy, with which the artist returns to tight rhymes and dancehall sounds across a total of twelve tracks. On first listen, given the choice of beats and lyrics, the new record seems to set itself apart from his previous album “V”, a more pained, introspective effort. But even though the sound has changed radically, digging its roots into sound system culture and fully absorbing the influence of the Red Bull Culture Clash 2017 experience, Ensi manages to craft a cohesive work, tied together by a common thread that connects it to his previous album in many ways — starting, first and foremost, with the opening track featuring his son's voice, just as “V” closed with it.

The album was launched with the videos for "Ivory Freestyle", "Clash Freestyle" and "Autogrill Freestyle", and in these three tracks alone the Turin-born artist proves his mastery as a rapper and his ability to navigate wildly different beats and sounds without ever clashing; with "Clash", he set out to build a well-structured journey, not just a playlist, a string of songs lined up one after another, but a story that unfolds swiftly and in every direction.

"Fratello mio" and "Vita intera" are two wonderful rap ballads, where the description of a feeling is never rhetorical nor trite, but purely real, where an older brother's worry and love become an expression of poetry through growth, and where the ghosts of one permeate the beats of the other:

My brother, there's no mistake, don't blame yourself, there's no reason for it, it's just that the world turns better for those who have no heart and the worst almost always happens to good people, I swear it will all pass sooner or later, I'm just afraid this pain might change you, stain your soul, steal your dreams, steal your years, steal what makes you special, more than the others

Listening to the album and tracing its stylistic exercises, it becomes clear that, years on from his debut, the rapper has definitively managed to shed the image of the Turin kid fighting to break free from the crowd of his own genre. On this, his fifth album, Ensi throws his personal and artistic growth right in your face - or rather, in your ears - and shows an almost unexpected maturity in every track.

Amid smoky soul samples, dancehall and old-school hip-hop, these twelve tracks aimed at the future have the ability to continually wrap around and reflect his feelings and moods. This young man, now grown into a man, has become a boulder - solid, steady and built to last - distinguished by the cracks that haven't destroyed him, and which instead are able to show the whole world every open fracture that has made him the artist he is, consistent with his own choices now and forever.

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15/05/2019