Coez is the most unpredictable of the artists of his generation

Silvano Albanese in art Coez he is perhaps the most unpredictable among the artists of his generation. On December 3, 2021 he released the album “Fly”his sixth soloist, and he was no different. What follows is our review of the album.

The one that in recent years has won over the public with a simpler and more traditional, almost reassuring guise, between romantic ballads like “La musica non c’è” and radio hits like “È semper bello” and “Domenica”? Or the one who in the second half of the 2000s with the Circolo Vizioso (first) and with the Brokenspeakers (then) wrote some of the most beautiful pages of Capitoline rap, before playing the part of the salmon and throwing himself into songwriting just as the rhymes and were barre preparing to emerge from the ghetto and conquer the charts? The perfect review of “Volare” lies entirely in the claim on the sticker stuck on the CD and vinyl packaging: “Contains underground hits and songs for the general public”. In his new album Coez focuses on inclusiveness: he continues to satisfy the mainstream audience with songs that wink at high rotation (the single “Come nelle canzone” is already a hit), but at the same time he tries to recover that segment of fans who, since the days of “Ali sporche”, have never forgiven him for his pop turn, dusting off the rhymes and beats.

After the boom of “Faccio un casino” and the consecration with “È semper bello”, Silvano Albanese – this is the real name of the 38-year-old Roman singer-songwriter and rapper – cuts the umbilical cord that has linked him in recent years to Niccolò Contessa of I Cani , with whom he composed the most profitable tandem – in terms of streams and platinum records, 30 in total between albums and singles – of the ItPop circuit of the last four years. And in order not to repeat himself and not to play it safe, in this sentence of his zigzag path, where you never know what to actually expect from each new move, he goes back to playing with his past. To demonstrate that in addition to the more pop Coez of the perfect verses for dedications and writings on the asphalt there was – and there is – something else, as evidenced by records such as “Son of nobody”, “Fenomeno”, “Senza mani ”, today considered cult by followers of the rap scene inside and outside the GRA.

“Volare” is full of references to the works of the first phase of his career, the one preceding the songwriting turning point of “Non Era Fiori” (it was 2011 and Riccardo Sinigallia showed him another path, parallel to rap), hidden here and there .

Starting from the title of the album, which takes up the track of the same name – the last – from the EP “Senza mani” (he also mentions it in “Ol’ Dirty”, the duet with Noyz Narcos: “I learned to fly by myself ”). From the past also come the producers who supported him on the thirteen tracks of the album, from Ford78 (he worked with him at the time of the Brokenspeakers and for his debut solo album, “Figlio di niente”, released in 2009) to Sine ( after the EP “Senza mani” the collaboration was renewed already in 2017 for part of “Faccio un casino”), to which Dirt O’Malley, Marz, Zef and Ceri, among others. All at the service of songs that don’t fit into a label.

It is Coez himself who refuses any categorisation: it ranges from tear-jerking ballads such as the same “Come nelle canzone”, “Margherita”, “Fra lecloud” (written based on “My brother is an only child” by Rino Gaetano), “Bomba a mano” and “Occhi rossa” (destined to become the new “La musica non c’è”) in pieces like an old wolf of rap who loses his hair but not his vice (“Wu-Tang”, “Faccia da robbery”, “Crack”, with Salmo and Massimo Pericolo, “Sex and drugs”, with Guè Pequeno and Gemitaiz). In “Cerchi con ilsmo” he duets with Neffa, from whom he learned the art of moving from refrains to rhymes with the credibility that many other colleagues lack. And in “Casse rotte” he finds the Brokenspeakers, recomposed almost ten years after the last album, to untie the folded arms of the purists waiting for him in the ghetto in a reconciling embrace.