Baustelle are back, freakier than ever
They mention the “California of love” (not that of Donald Trump) and wink at certain rock productions of the 60s, with references to surf music (complete with Hammond organ which appears at a certain point in the piece). They sing a “hymn to change, transformation, diversity“, trying – they say – to “transmit a sense of purification from the contaminated, a desire to break chains and liberate from toxins”, so that every listener is “free to sing these words in his own way and give a shape and a face to his own personal oppression”. Baustelle are back and more freaks than ever.
It’s on the single.”Undress me”, which will be released tonight and which we listened in previewwhich Francesco Bianconi, Rachele Bastreghi and Claudio Brasini have entrusted with the task of paving the way for the release of the new album “El Galactico”, which in turn will pave the way for the festival – of the same name – organized by the trio for the days of 1st and June 2nd in Florence to celebrate the first twenty-five years of the iconic band of the independent scene of the Italian 2000s at the Cascine Amphitheatre.
The album will arrive on April 4thtwo years after the previous “Elvis”. For the single that precedes it, Baustelle collaborated with Federico Nardellialready alongside Gazzelle and Colapesce-Dimartino. The song is characterized by a sunny, electric and tense sound, while the lyrics are an invitation to let go: “It’s a song that talks about the desire to be other than what you are or have become. This is a feeling that has always been present in many of our song lyrics and it is the feeling that ultimately caused our birth as a band many years ago – explains Bianconi, leader of the band – we formed because we wanted to be different from everything else, different from the world”.
It’s worth mentioning Nanni Morettiwho is no coincidence that he is a big fan of the trio (and often, in plain clothes, goes to listen to Bianconi and his associates in concert): “You shouted horrendous and very violent things and you became ugly. I shouted the right things and now I’m a splendid forty year old”, he said in “Dear Diary”. Here, applied to Baustelle, and to what the band of “Charlie fa surf”, “The war is over” and “The Unforgiven” represented, this famous quote sounds like this: the others shouted horrendous and very violent things and the others are ugly. They shouted the right things and now they are splendid fifty-year-olds. “I also feel this sense of disgust, of desire for dispossession contained in the words of the song, at this moment, renewed and reinvigorated by the critical historical moment we are going through,” adds Bianconi.
“El Galactico Festival” will be their Woodstock, one two days of peace & love throughout Tuscany which will bring forward by a month the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of “Illustrated Youth Guide”the album that in the summer of 2000 began to circulate the name of Baustelle even outside the circuit of the independent scene. There will be, they say, “new, emerging artists and bands, kids with whom we feel an affinity and in whom we see the spirit that animated our days during the ‘Illustrated Subsidiary of Youth’ era”. And then “live talks and podcasts” and “vinyls played from afternoon to sunset”. Among the first names announced are those of Emma Nolde, Neoprimitivi, Marta Del Grandi and Bassolino for the DJ set. “The schedule was designed to breathe the essence of the group,” they say. Francesco Bianconi, Rachele Bastreghi and Claudio Brasini describe the event as “an immersive experience in the heart of Tuscany“, where it all began, even before the release of “Illustrated Subsidiary of Youth”, when Bianconi and Brasini – already members of the Subterraneans – met Bastreghi in Montepulciano and started one of the most exciting stories of Italian indie rock of that unrepeatable period.
