MACCHINA MACCHERONICA

With MM, Stormy Six reaches the depth of their musical madness and again fully justify their RIO adherence. Indeed they might even go a bit far with this album from 79, their music often being modern contemporary classical music along with weird and frequent vocals (maybe not as evident than Etronfou) and dissonant but without being shocking. With MM, SS is proposing more wind instruments than ever, plus a full-time cellist, but the music remains mostly acoustic, even if there is an electric guitar and bass, the latter is actually quite interesting throughout the album.

As I said, their music is now reaching a complete madness, but coupled with a certain kind of goofiness and a tad of circus-like atmospheres, plus the more experimental music, this makes the mostly-acoustic (there is some electric guitars) music even more inaccessible than it needed to be. I just never had the patience to actually understand what SS's music was about in this album, but sometimes they're quite impressive and at their proggiest, they're soundacular, the almost 6-mins Megafono being the highlight of the album. While there are many fine moments on MM, there are a few glitches and difficult passages, making its progress on your lazer beam a bit more arduous, I'm thinking of the a capella Enzo, and the following (and album longest) Verbale.

Definitely of SS's better (and certainly their most personal from their later discography) albums, MM could easily be in your first wave of SS acquisition or be part of the second batch, if you've enjoyed the more "conventional" albums. A good one, but maybe over the top , even in the RIO realm.