FERRO BATTUTO

The defect of this album is to include different sides of Battiato, so that listeners who don't have followed his whole career can be surprised by some track. Personally I think that his cover of Jimi Hendirx's Hey Joe values the price of the album, but I wouldn't be surprised if a Hendrix fan finds it awful because of its classical-ethnic arrangement.

The other song "out of the lines" is the long closer "Il Potere del Canto (The Power of Singing) which is one of the sonic patchworks which caused Battiato to be laid off by his label in the 70s.

Of the many people credited on the album, a special mention goes to Natacha Atlas whose voice adds a lot to "Personalità Empirica". She sings also on "Scherzo in Minore" but it's just background vocals.

The other songs are well arranged. The lyrics of "Sarcofagia" are in line with Battiato's apparent nonsense full of quotes he was used in the 80s, while some other songs are closer to the 90s output, but the highlight for me if the closer and its ghost tracks. It's hypnotic with a tempo and sounds which come from the old krautrock-like past of Battiato's early 70s. The first ghost track is quite psychedelic but I don't feel it as a separate song. It's a trippy dreamy track which fades into a TV speech in German which he has used at least on another album. In the last part there's more editing. He must have joked a lot with scissors and playbacks to obtain this old fashioned psychedelic electronic thing.

It's a good album that I think is currently underrated on this site.