VISCONTI - DPCM

Valerio Visconti is a twenty-year-old who emerges from the spectacular lands of Monferrato, more precisely from Acqui Terme, a territory historically fruitful in musical ideas.

The young artist steps onto the field with a debut work conceived during the pandemic period. The title leaves no room for doubt: "DPCM" sums up, with a cold acronym, the whole host of feelings, fears, difficulties, hopes and much more that arose over the course of this anomalous and, hopefully, unrepeatable historical period.

Visconti's approach is of the bloody kind. His is a sharp, at times ironic songwriting style, which also leaves room for flights of intimism and shows surprising metrical and synthesizing skills, by no means typical at his young age.

The scratchy post-punk used to channel all this expressive charge releases the energy and wit that the Piedmontese lad kept chained up throughout the months of lockdown. The seven tracks that make up the album, produced by Giulio Ragno Favero (Teatro degli Orrori), entirely written, composed and played by Valerio, prove versatile and enterprising, and if a few small rough edges can be spotted, they can be read as a deliberate flaw inserted to bear witness to the worrying situation surrounding us.

The influences oozing from the tracks are very clear: from the dirty pop-rock of "La morte a Venezia", which references Thomas Mann and combines, in an unlikely scenario, the lyrics of Battiato with the stylistic fragrances of Strokes, to the Baustelle-like virtues that polish "Le idi di marzo", an episode that tries to lighten illusory routine by even citing the conspiracy carried out against Julius Caesar.

If "Narcisi sbagliati" is a smeared, deep ballad that examines the sometimes toxic relationship one has with oneself and the uplifting energy obtained when love is instead bestowed on others, all the suggestions and uncertainties tied to the great disillusionment of lockdown are vented in "Ammorbidente", a track a bit Interpol and very Cccp, not only in its harmonic shadings.

"Poeti" is the first lyric Visconti has written in Italian, since he usually approaches his compositions in English, and while the unleashed punk of the title track vents the exhaustion and rage suffered by a young man shut indoors for several months, "Nulla mi urterebbe più" is the union-mandated quota dedicated to intimacy, in this case liberating and psychoanalytic, which freely deals with the complex father-son relationship.

Visconti's (sic) surprising debut album is urgent and fierce.

Shouting into uncertainty, he tries to capture the feelings of someone too old to be an adult and too young to be a teenager. The Piedmontese artist's songwriting chases a kind of stability between post-punk onslaughts and singer-songwriter crossovers, where different influences coexist and merge into a fresh sound, steeped in imperfection as much as melody, in anger as much as inspiration.

The lyrics touch on bleak themes like death, moral decay and madness, concepts explored, dissected and pushed to extremes in their relevance to the present day and in being the product of an age built on imbalance and contradiction.

Visconti is a promising name, one that's clearly gotten off on the right foot.

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27/03/2022