No one will ever be able to take away Dente’s heart
Giuseppe Peveri was born in Fidenza, in the province of Parma, on 28 February 1976. Giuseppe Peveri he records records under the pseudonym Tooth. To date he has released eight records. The last of these, “Souvenir Hotel”was released in the spring of 2023. We wish him a birthday by repeating the review of his latest album written for us by Marco Di Milia.
Welcome to the hotel of memories. Not a dusty basement or a darker oblivion, but an orderly structure of comfortable rooms in pastel colours, perhaps just a little out of fashion, where the feelings that brought us to our present, for better or for worse, can peacefully reside. A place full of people and memories that Giuseppe Peveri, alias Dente, has brought together over the years, taking on failures, stories and desires to tell in an album that can host them all, namely “Hotel Souvenir”.
Pieces of life collected by the singer-songwriter from Fidenti in an indefinite time suspended between past and future, for dialogues with the self that is still waiting to try the many experiences that have characterized his existence and career, as well as the fear of feeling vulnerable to the suggestions of provincial reality. Thus, in these ten tracks, Dente stages a composite gallery of sliding doors that have led him exactly to where he is today, aware and also somewhat reassured by his own choices.
In “Hotel Souvenir” the musician’s poetics do not change, always attentive to the weight of the words, finely ironic and even at times cynical, in which the Battisti of “Anima Latina” are echoed, the homely atmospheres and the intimate touch of his acoustic guitar , which returned to the scene after the all-electric imprint of the previous “Dente”, from 2020. Yet, what gave the album a new color, made up of delicate touches of piano, retro arrangements and even carefree disco music, was the Dente’s determined desire to move towards new coordinates with a production attentive to a pop style without banalization led by Federico Nardelli. The author himself, when presenting the album, specified what his intentions were in this regard: “The idea was to make a fairly bare album, with few things, and also a little dusty, with this slightly more realistic taste ”. It is therefore a collection of short but intense brush strokes with a strong autobiographical flavour, as in the tradition of old-time records, in which the attention is entirely concentrated on the narrative, battered, disillusioned and also incredibly full of suggestions.
We then pass through rooms that tell personal stories that end up becoming universal, in a constant reflection of lightness and depth. From the inevitably somewhat rogue nostalgia of “10 years ago”, we find ourselves reviewing photographs, thoughts and hopes summed up in an honest “I just wanted to live / And you wanted to stay out of trouble”. Again, there is a knock on the door of the emotions of a now compromised feeling in “Cambiare idea”, while with the rhythms of the bossa nova, in “Allegria del tempo che passa” comes a dreamy reflection on the inexorable passage of time, accompanied by the Selton choir .
Again, playing on the edge of feelings, “Discoteca solitude” opens with blatantly dance-like sounds with the invitation to go and experience first-hand what one’s solitude is like and, again, in “A year to forget”, to drive a bittersweet existential balance is above all the enveloping presence of the strings.
Dente therefore makes his stumbles sexy in “L’ambiente della Venere”, but does not give up his anxiety for the future in the gloom of a generational comparison with Carlo Corbellini of Post Nebbia in “La vita up to here”. Finally, after an invitation to lightheartedness in the rhyming rhyme of “The world with eyes” in which the protagonist madly leaves the microphone to Ditonellapiaga, Giorgio Poi, Colapesce, Dimartino, VV and Fulminacci, all that remains is to draw conclusions with “Un time travel”, in which memories and time jumps cross paths. Closing his “Hotel Souvenir” Dente writes to the boy who has been there to make him realize that you cannot be young and happy together, but also to never be scared of what you dream of and that, despite all the stumbles along the way, no one will ever succeed. to take away his heart.
In this way, by subverting the linearity of time, Dente lets part of his intrinsic melancholy fade to calm himself in an environment as rich in sound as it is crowded with memories such as “Hotel Souvenir”. He chooses to host the roads travelled, choices and decisions made, as well as all the people he has been and no longer is, certainly not to abandon them, but to visit them and for the pleasure of finding oneself without regrets and taking comfort in those snapshots of life. It certainly won’t be an extra luxury, but it certainly isn’t that bad to pop in.
