KLIPPA KLOPPA - Bijoux

Una piuma regge il mondo

What a responsibility!

How much we miss the solos, the songs that actually differ from one another, the sudden melodic twists and the instrumental scores that seem to have leapt out of a 70's film, perhaps stirred up just before breaking into an irreverent verse? To step into the world of "Bijoux", the album marking the long-awaited return of Klippa Kloppa, an elusive creature strictly "Made in Snowdonia", one can't help but start from a wistfulness for certain increasingly rare musical constructs, with the intent - also, and above all - of restoring the soul of an album played with the kind of mastery and painstaking, old-school care rarely heard anymore. Yes, old-school: an overused phrase, but a necessary one to frame everything from the outset and swiftly wave off any hasty labelling.

If the first two tracks ("La piuma che regge il mondo" and "Linea d'aria") make clear what's been said above, the following eight amplify that impression even further. There's the lopsided ballad ("Righe rotte"), somewhere between Bongusto at the bar and Jay Ferguson, the little guitars trotting along like toy horses on "Soddisfazione", amid smirks and arthouse shades, and the voice of Mariella Capobianco - who also wrote all the lyrics on "Bijoux" - as sarcastic as it is mocking and detached from an outside world in total decline, largely unrecognisable and thus worth ribbing with relish, and above all with that spark that only true musicians - the brilliant, roguish kind, that is - know how to bring to the table.

The commentary could carry on with "Le sette e sette", which sounds as though it's sung and played straight out of a cuckoo clock, while the following "Profondo" reveals an almost endemic predisposition of Klippa Kloppa for a kind of drunk and intoxicating fusion, vaguely in the vein of Prevost.

"Some say that without communicating we don't exist", Klippa Kloppa seem keen to point out, after years of silence and disenchantment, interrupted dreams and lost baggage. The new songbook from the band - made up of Mariella Capobianco (vocals), Mariano Calazzo (vocals, guitars), Nicola Mazzocca (vocals, guitars, bass, keyboards, electronics, but also the project's ever-present deus ex machina, and, in a now very distant past, also a contributor to this very site), Marco Di Gennaro (guitars), Simone Caputo (keyboards) and Stefano Costanzo (drums, percussion) - is nonetheless a seemingly zany music box, a peculiar contraption hiding, among pins and tines, a sound design that is nothing short of sui generis, shaped by synthesisers that move now happily in the shadows, now cheerful as confetti in the air, and by bass lines that pulse with perpetual life.

"Bijoux" is, in the end, a magical little sound-box in its own way. Metaphors aside: an album of pure pop craftsmanship, a rarity in these times (here we go again!). One of those records so richly layered you could live inside it for months on end. Which says a great deal about the evergreen drive of a tightly-knit group of musicians, sabbatical breaks notwithstanding, and backed by a label as attentive as precious few others still around in what many once loved to call the "underground".

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25/01/2026