The album full of doubts by Avion Travel
Interviewed by us, presenting the album “Prive”, the singer of Avion Travel Peppe Servillo (who turns 64 today) explained: “This is a record full of doubts. They are stories of middle age, stories of grown men.” “Prive” it is the last album released by the band from Campania and dates back to May 2018. We picked it up again, so we suggest you read the review he wrote of the album for us Claudio Todesco.
There’s this beautiful, intimidating sound at one point on Avion Travel’s latest record. It is dark and elegant at the same time, a bass clarinet that describes a horizon of fear and beauty reinforced by powerful chords. It’s a song that talks about love and erotic desire, but it’s the first sound that came to mind when I heard Peppe Servillo say that in “Privé” Avion Travel gave a shape to pain. It is these dark vibrations, this desire to investigate and talk about the limit that makes the new album by the band from Campania special, the first composed of autographed songs for fifteen years now. “It’s a record that needs intimacy,” they say.
It is an indirect and not at all flashy, but decidedly suggestive way of giving shape to the pain born from the death, just over a year ago, of Fausto Mesolella, an important member of Avion who died while the group was preparing to work on this album. And then there are songs that deny this dark impulse and are lighter or perhaps simply more welcoming. “It seems that some songs move suspiciously, offending others that instead welcome, console and warm,” Servillo said. “The latter rely on words, on their precision, on their ability to represent the world, but the former remain to deny this, darkly reciting impulses and sensations”.
Four songs belong to the repertoire of songs written by members of Avion and lent to other performers. They are not waste. Indeed, “A me gli occhi”, which was on a 2002 album by Patty Pravo, and “Se truly Dio esisti”, performed by Fiorella Mannoia eight years ago, are among the best things on the album. The first opens the album with a dry sound of drums and a wonderful Wurlitzer timbre, it grows among ghostly sounds, a chorus from Annamaria Di Marco, a magnificent crescendo of sax and trumpet in the instrumental coda. With the second, Avion attempted to go to Sanremo in 2009, but were not admitted. Now we can listen to it again in an exciting version for voice and piano which closes the first part of the album and already sounds like a classic.
The most thoughtful and original songs, with the peak of bizarreness represented by “Caro maestro”, where Mesolella’s voice and guitar are heard again, are balanced by other light and polite ones. This is the case of the single “Come si canta una question”, already in the Musica Nuda repertoire, now launched by a video shot in the Royal Castle of Racconigi quoting Aleksandr Sokurov’s film “Russian Ark”. It was delicious and delicate in the version sung by Petra Magoni, now it is elegant, with more emphasis on the old-time chorus. Or “Alfabeto”, a playful song with lyrics by Pacifico, also the author of the final “Dolce e amaro”, or “L’amorearancio”, a little theater on pre-nuptial doubts animated by the beautiful sounds of double bass and flugelhorn.
“Privé” is a record in which it is still possible to hear men, people of flesh and blood, behind the instruments, their taste, their intelligence. In this case, their ability to say a lot by using words and tools sparingly. Without Mesolella, the songs are characterized by the timbres of Peppe D’Argenzio’s reed instruments and the acoustic, electric and electronic keyboards of newcomer Duilio Galioto (only in a couple of songs we hear Emanuele Bultrini’s guitar). The album also lines up the questions that Avion Travel ask themselves about their profession and the possibility that the word, today abused and worn out, can still represent worlds. And perhaps it also speaks of the need that everyone has to find “a saint, an eternal artist who conquers death beyond fatigue and fate”.
