Daniele Silvestri, an acrobat of the word

On February 26, 2016, eight years ago, Daniele Silvestri released one of his most successful albums: “Acrobats”. The first that brought the Roman musician to the top of the charts. The following is our review of the album.

Daniele Silvestri is someone who weighs his words. He’s an acrobat of the word, if we want to use the title of this new album. He is not one of those artists who always presents their new work with hyperbole or self-certifications of quality. So, if for once he says that his new album is the best, we at least have to reflect or weigh his words in our turn.

There is certainly the fact that “Acrobati” is an album out of the ordinary, in the career of an artist who has little that is normal.

For history: the last studio album was “SCOTCH” in 2011, then a Sanremo in 2013 which was followed by only an EP, then again the experience with Max Gazzé and Niccolò Fabi. A record that is a sort of restart after a happy period. And for the way in which it was made: written directly in the studio, together mostly with a series of new musicians, ranging from the “Milanese tour” (Dellera, D’Erasmo, Gabrielli. Sebastiano De Gennaro), to the Roman one (Adriano Viterbini of the Bud Spencer Blues Explosion) to friends from Puglia (Caparezza and Roy Paci, in whose studios the first part of the recordings took place), to various guests (such as Diodato).

Even “Live in the studio”, like “The best album of my career” is a great narrative plot for the presentation of a work. But when a record has been recorded in a particular way, you can definitely hear it. And this is precisely the case with “Acrobats”. Whether it is the best album of Daniele’s career, time will tell. But in the meantime it is a varied yet compact collection, in which Silvestri plays with sounds and words, but aiming straight at the result.

The mind goes straight to Daniele’s third album, the monumental “Il dado”, and not only for the quantitative dimension: there, 19 songs and 81 minutes, here 18 and 74 minutes.

But precisely for the qualitative dimension: the flow of ideas and words, the lightness and compositional freedom: which goes from the rock of “La mia casa” (offset by the reflective text on identity and places), to the delicate electronics of ” Acrobats” (equally moving, this too for the way it describes today’s condition, without judging), to the almost jazz sound experiments of “Il monolocale”, to the retro song of “A dispetto dei pronostici”, to the hip-hop of “Bio boogie ” with the Funky Pushertz, to the puns of “The salt war” (imagine what happens when you put together two magicians of the pun, Silvestri and Caparezza? Here).

In “Acrobats” there are so many sounds, stories and ideas that would be enough to sustain several careers. But variety never becomes an end in itself: this is a record of songs-songs, in the end. And great songs. Acrobatics, yes: perfectly successful, and in the end always returning to his feet.