Cosmo's gentle revolution

At a certain point, on May 21, 2021, three years ago, Cosmos (Marco Jacopo Bianchi) released his fourth album, “The third summer of love”. In an interview he introduced him to us using these words: “I understood that in this phase of my career I want to drag people along without necessarily following the crypto-fascist scheme of the pop song: 'You have to do this song like this'. I got bored, understand? That stuff is a chain.” What you can read in the following lines is our review of that album.

Very powerful statements: “It's the science of the goods, but without unconsciousness you're dead due to prudence: you make a hit, I'll go back to being a virgin”. Songs that don't care about the traditional song form: they exceed 5, 6, sometimes even 8 minutes. Sounds and arrangements that look to the expressive freedom of the 90s, Italian (Bluvertigo of the “Acids and Bases” trilogy, “Metallo non metallo”, “Zero”) and beyond (Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk). Call it, if you want, but with due proportions, his “The plastic factory” or his “Don Giovanni”: a reaction to the success achieved with the last two albums, “L'ultima festa” and “Cosmotronic”, between Gold and platinum records, songs on the radio and concerts in sports halls. Cosmo tells his dissent with a twelve-piece album, more than an hour of music, which sounds like a programmatic, artistic and political manifesto at the same time and looks a lot at the hippie spirit of the hippy culture of the late '60s (the the real Summer of Love is that of '67) in terms of the anarchy of the rave movement of the late '80s.

In “The third summer of love”, conceived last year in his Cosmic Studio in Ivrea also as a reaction to the closures and the impact that the pandemic had on live performances (it is no coincidence that he played it in preview by placing speakers outside clubs like the Monk in Rome and the Circolo Magnolia in Milan, broadcasting everything in live streaming on YouTube), the former Drink To Me does whatever he wants, free from any form of conditioning. Of course, it's not Stockhausen, because at the end of the day we still remain in the realm of pop, even if Cosmo does everything he can not to follow what he himself defined in our interview as the crypto-fascist schemes of the genre (and he succeeds, especially in the part final part of the album, from “Gundala” to “Noi”, passing through “Io Ballo” and “Vele al vento”, four pieces which together practically represent more than a third of the overall duration of the album). And it's not even Iosonouncane, who compared to the Cosmo of “The Third Summer of Love” with “IRA” did a more radical, and a tad disturbing, research job.

It is more the Battisti of the white albums with Panella, the one who, between informal schemes and unconventional lyrics, escaped success – a clearly greater success, much greater than that of Cosmo – while continuing to address the mainstream public. And then he himself says that in certain passages of the lyrics, above all the “let's go back to random” in “Fresca”, his mind went right to Panella. “The Third Summer of Love” is a perfect Trojan horse. In the songs of the Piedmontese musician's new album there are very long intros and codas, abundant instrumentals, but also irresistible hooks (the keyboards and synths of “Antipop” make the piece sound like a lysergic version of “Video killed the radio star”) and choruses -slogans that forcefully stick themselves in your head (“Illegal music”, “Dum dum”, “Puccy bom”, “Mango”). Subversive, rebellious pop.

It's a gentle revolution, that of Cosmo. Which has the ambition to shake things up a bit. Fuck the magic formulas, the feats that for a few years now have made the records look more like compilations of various artists than actual albums (here there are very few guests: Silvia Konstance sings in “Fuori”, Maurizio Brunod plays the classical guitar in “La Cattedrale”, his son Carlo Adriano sings in “Mango”, with the hand of DJ Bawrut, while Giacono Laser “sprinkled 'Puccy bom' with laughter and brilliant ideas”), the songs written with ten hands: “It's music, not factory”, he repeats in “Antipop”. The hope is that it truly represents the beginning of a new, great season.