Stormy Six – Un Biglietto Del Tram (Vinyl)

Descriere

"It should be no surprise that a group associated with the 1978 Rock In Opposition festival would release strange albums, and Stormy Six varied over time in their approach, but 1975’s Un Biglietto Del Tram has a very specific appeal. It must first be noted that while many albums with lyrics in other languages can be appreciated as essentially instrumental music with a vocal as merely another instrument, those who are familiar with Romance languages will note that there is more going on here, even if not fluent in Italian. One should examine the translations of the lyrics to investigate the inspiration, which is political in a very specific form, to understand exactly what is happening here. Nevertheless, a listener can also appreciate the music on its own terms, as a blend of Italian and European folk with experimental rock, in much the same way that several British folk rock groups began doing around the era. Consider Pentangle, Fairport Convention, and others. Yet while those groups looked to jazz, blues and related styles to avoid simply doing folk rock with a British twist, Stormy Six was an obvious choice for RIO because while they played a kind of Southern European folk rock, they did so with a weird, experimental, abstract twist which suited the political, twist. Moreover, the instrumentation, which emphasized the Southern European tradition, brought the album into rather stark relief against groups like Fairport Convention or Pentangle, amazing as they were, even more clearly when they incorporated more Eastern sounds for the sake of the political themes. Hence, the importance of studying the lyrics to understand the inspiration.

Yet the abstraction, which is not jazz, but more 20th Century avant-garde without the dissonance, truly sets Un Biglietto apart. There just isn’t much like this, and it is worth appreciating the composition of RIO as a whole, then, bringing the Italian (Stormy Six), the distinctly French (Etron Fou Leloublan), British experimentalism (Henry Cow), Swedish oddity (Samla Mammas Manna), and the pan-European, classically influenced Belgian group, Univers Zero. The geographic composition wound up being as important as anything else, which truly can be appreciated in the context of an album like Un Biglietto Del Tram. Avant-garde without the Henry Cow noise, European folk without the bounciness of Samla Mammas Manna… there’s just so much added."