Vasco Brondi, the first of the tour: songs to illuminate the darkness
A red cloth on the stage crossed by some luminous streams, which light up as if lava was flowing. The Cage in Livorno, theater of the first date of Vasco Brondi's touropened by Umberto Maria Giardini, is suspended between the earthly mechanical nature of the province, the one that the singer-songwriter has never stopped telling and where boredom becomes “blessed” because it forces you to act, and the ethereal magic of songs that take you far or very close, at “40km” or between “La Terra, Emilia, la Luna”, a space in which dream and reality roll together. It almost seems like a sign of destiny that outside the club, in the garden where you can drink a beer and chat, there is also a reproduction of a giant moonas if you were inside a Fellini film. Accompanying the artist, wearing a hat with western references, is an excellent band, which seems to come from an indefinite border area between country and electronic: Andrea Faccioli e Riccardo Onori to the guitars, Niccolo Fornabaio on the battery, Clara Rigoletti on keyboards and violin, Carlo Maria Troller on the bass.
Brondi is at the centre, he moves in a disheveled and shamanic way, starts the songs, recites poems, tells anecdotes and reveals, as has already happened in the past, the ending of some symbolic songs such as “The girls are fine”. Because everyone who has listened to this beautiful song at least once has wondered whether Sara and Chiara, the protagonists, are really happy today. The setlist is practically perfect, one of the best proposals in his career. There is the journey into the history of the first beat of The Lights of the Power Stationbetween pieces tightened and spat out again with force as “Dear catastrophe”, “Arsonists”, “To fight acne”and the transformation over time, with re-emerged gems such as “I Sonic Youth” or “I destini generali”, sung at the top of your lungs by an audience that has always seemed to keep it inside. The transition between the older, darker pieces and the poppier and brighter ones of the present works thanks to a process of compensation, And this confirms how the repertoire of Brondi, one of the most important singer-songwriters around, is becoming increasingly richer. There's even room for a cover, “What will be” by Lucia Dalla. “Maybe it had nothing to do with it, but I liked the idea of doing it,” smiles Brondi. In that call to the inscrutable future, which even “in disaster is always there to smile at us” as he sings in “Macbeth in the Mist”, there is a good part of Brondi's poetics. “The time we can change is here and today,” he says. “The situation is excellent,” the CCCP would add with a sneer.
In his concerts, as demonstrated by his new album “A sign of life” (read the interview here), you never escape from reality, even the most ferocious one. “A dark room should not be locked, it should be explored with a flashlight, it should be illuminated,” says the artist with a reference to the fires and lights contained in his latest pieces. It is increasingly rare, especially today in which the show often prevails over the concert, and the songs are more caresses than shocks, that a live performance has the strength to keep one anchored to the ground, but at the same time to lift. The war, the loneliness, the migratory flows told in it “The good season”which starts as if it were a news program, life that bends but does not break, are the red threads that connect, between words and “calls for human beings”, the entire structure of the concert, which despite lasting 1 hour and 45 minutes flows without excessive declines.
Being “a first” there is margin and space for some errors, for the idea, then with a cold mind, to make some changes, but it is precisely in that total lack of perfection, far from the concert-events in the usual big cities where sometimes it is more important to show that you are there than to enjoy the collective ritual, which reconnects with the beauty of truth. It is no coincidence that Brondi closes the live with “In the depths of Veneto” making everyone dance and sing, almost in a tribal way. It's the story of an apparent failure, of a girl who returns home carrying the wounds of someone who tried, but didn't make it. Yet, even between those folds a light filters. Because sometimes to win you don't have to fight, but simply give up.
Ladder:
Light up everything
The girls are fine
Mechanisms
Here
Fire inside
Fire
The Earth, Emilia, the Moon
Out of town
40km
Dear catastrophe
When you return from abroad
Macbeth in the fog
Sonic Youth
The good season
What will it be (cover by Lucio Dalla)
The general destinies
Chakras
To fight acne
Arsonists
Mystical
Lightning shaped
A sign of life
Deep in Veneto
