Eugenio Finardi: Sugo (Cramps, 1976)

An album reflecting the mood of its time, the strong political involvement of Italian music in the mid-Seventies. The opening track is one of the best known symbols of the era, "Musica ribelle", celebrating the unstoppable urge of rock music, dragging away the youth from their comfortable passivity and making them part of the "rebellion". Despite the strong connection with the social climate of the period, the song is direct, heartfelt and lacks any rhetorics: for these reasons, it hasn't aged at all, and is still as intense and striking as it was at the time.
The rest of the album is much less topical in its themes - and much more evidently naïve in the rhymes, but is musically very good nontheless. The band who played on the record was composed of top-notch musicians from the Milanese progressive scene: Area's Patrizio Fariselli, Paolo Tofani, Ares Tavolazzi, (soon to be) PFM's Lucio Fabbri and the well-known Cramps Records sessionmen Hugh Bullen, Walter Calloni, Alberto Camerini. "Quasar" is an all-instrumental track clearly reminding of Area, but the album's most remarkable for its fusion of jazz-rock with American folk-rock models (a pretty unusual fact, since it was the UK which inspired most of the musicians back in those days). Finardi's passion for American music has its biographic roots: Finardi's mother is American and he was raised in an American school in Milan. His excellent English pronounciation can be noticed in "La C.I.A.", an intriguing and quite "early" raggae/rock experiment.

Here's an interesting documentary/interview about "Musica ribelle" (in Italian).

Tracklist:

1. Musica ribelle
2. La radio
3. Quasar
4. Soldi
5. Ninnananna
6. Sulla strada
7. Voglio
8. Oggi ho imparato a volare
9. La C.I.A.
10. La paura del domani

Download (160 kbps)

Similar music on the blog:
Alberto Camerini: Cenerentola e il pane quotidiano (Cramps, 1976)
Area: Maledetti (Cramps, 1976)