Friday, August 20, 2010

Amari: Apotheke (OnDaNomala, 2002)

The indie-hop vogue hearlded elsewhere by the AntIcon label has never really caught on here in Italy. "Apotheke", a very early and paradigmatic of the tendency, seems anyway to indicate that the style would fit perfectly with our panorama.
Later works by Amari would lean in a more electropop direction, but here hip-hop is still the main course. A quirky kind of hip-hop, for sure: you get the beats, the scratches and the rap flow, but nothing sounds like the usual "posse" aesthetics of Italian hip-hop.

The musical background is full of fluffy electro sounds and acoustic guitars, in a perfect "indie" fashion, and lacks any aggressiveness. The voices - uncombactive and intriguingly arranged in half-sung vocal harmonies - are the ones of spoilt kids from the middle-class bourgeoisie, lazy university students with all eases and no will to remonstrate against anything.
And the lyrics, they wallow in their everyday uselessness: personal relations rifracted through fragmented metaphors just for the sake of sounding a bit cryptic.

Everything should point to a horribly pretentious and poor album, but for some miracle it's not like that. The songs are light, delicate and tuneful; the music and lyrics pleasantly mix genres and registers: hip-hop and indie-pop, youth slang and (wannabe) cultured terms.
So thumbs up for Amari - this time, at least. Starting from the following "Gamera", the band would become more and more annoying...


Tracklist:

  1. Camogli
  2. Pianetarock
  3. Megamedio
  4. Apotheke
  5. Letter to Kafey
  6. Ottakring
  7. Folkgalore
  8. Berlino è silenziosa
  9. Whale Grotto
Download (192 kbps)


Similar albums on the blog:
Fare soldi: Sappiamo dove abiti (Riotmaker, 2008)
Artemoltobuffa: L'aria misteriosa (Aiuola, 2007)