Boosta: “This is my most honest work”

Boosta he is the keyboard player of Subsonic. Boosta on 28 October 2016, taking a break from the Turin band, he released his first solo album, “The Smart Room”. A record that fully satisfied him, as he explained in the press conference: “This is my most honest work. Certainly, the one where I hid the least. I forgot about electronics and I came to terms with the song form, at least as I mean it now. And do you know what happened? This is our review of the album written eight years ago.

It’s a beautiful and dangerous game that Boosta has chosen to play with “The intelligent room”. More beautiful than dangerous, at least for those who listen, because the Subsonica keyboard player, who over the years has been able to build a very solid reputation as a soloist in fields more linked to dance and electronics, at the dawn of 43 years of age has chosen to spill the beans by rediscovering himself singer-songwriter: a surprising move that can only do good, in a panorama where predictability – even where it shouldn’t exist – is becoming a dogma.

It is best not to be enchanted by the large group of guests who came to lend their voices and pens, from Nek to Giuliano Palma, passing through Malika Ayane, Marco Mengoni, Luca Carboni, Raf, Cosmo, Briga, Enrico Ruggeri and Diodato: such an important step, especially at this age, it’s good to do it in company, preferably good, and Davide Dileo – he explained it to us himself – couldn’t have found better company.

The danger we were talking about before, if anything, is run in putting so many irons on the fire: first of all because a first work – Boosta is not new to adventures outside of Subsonica, but not of this type – inevitably contains issues developed in the time, when you have two decades of experience behind you – and therefore of raw material to transform into songs – the ability to organize becomes fundamental. Secondly because the guest stars, on records, are pleasant for those who listen but tiring for those who host them: matching a voice to an atmosphere, a melody, a sound or a story is no small task, in which in the past they have failed even in very big ones.

Here, despite the inevitable ups and downs traceable in the thirteen episodes that make up “The Intelligent Room”, what holds everything together and makes it interesting is spontaneity: in Boosta’s debut as a singer-songwriter there is very little, if any, recording operation .

Rather, there is an air of divertissement, even if the necessary tare has been made: this, for those who wrote and recorded it, is a necessary album, not a filler. It is hardly surprising, in fact, that the song capable of striking the most at first listening is precisely the title track, the most naked and essential song of those collected on the album, where practically only the piano and Dileo’s voice hold the game. : from here, probably, we must start to orient ourselves among the thirteen episodes of the album, which – all things considered – resembles, more than a photo album, a Picassian portrait of an artist who, discovering a new mature youth, seems starting to make peace with himself. And from whom, now, we expect interesting developments, in all those that will be – or that he wants them to be – his careers.