One can half imagine at Progressive rock meets they have heated discussions about which of Battiato's LPs are the most superior. It's probably a toss-up between this from 1973 and Clic (1974) which garnered a reissue on Island records, one of the very few feats of cross-over that Italo Prog achieved. Clic is a little too anti-septic for my now hoary tastes, and I'm suspicious of anything like Bill Bruford, Peter Gabriel or Robert Fripp's work which dons a smart suit, tidies up the synth parts and saunters into the post-punk vanguard pretending it was now trendy.

Like those mass classroom scraps you had when you were a kid, the lame thing to do when the teacher showed up was to tuck your shirt in, loiter at the back pretending you were just examining the poster with the frog-spawn on it, that in no way were you involved in any kind of debacle. The stupid kids on the other hand didn't notice the teacher had come in, might have still been brawling, perhaps one holding a dustbin in his hand. Clic is a little bit too clean and thus, even though ten years ago we might have applauded it for being presciently new-wave, now I sort of despise it for its sleek textures.

My friend, the scholar Jon Dale gets plenty of props from me, so he can field the occasional catty swipe; he loves it! Jon is something of an authority on Battiato, indeed he was the first person to play me any, but in some way I suspect this may in some way be to do with the fact that FB survived the blood-letting that was punk and went on to do records such as "Cafe-Table-Musik", which Dale incidentally loves. Dale veers away from the unacceptable horror that these Italo Prog records represent and indeed some of the stuff he recommended I check out was rather too tasteful for me. Stuff like Prima Materia recordings and the Die Schnatel label. Ah, the meta-critical, nitty-gritty, bitch-fest that is music blogging! Doncha just love it.....

"Sulle corde di Aries" is a masterpiece and an essential purchase. Franco's singing is almost in the style of a Franciscan monk layered over these harpsichord and hand-drum grooves which are drenched in echo, hand-triggered bass pulses reverberating over freely-plucked mbira. In many ways it follows the original hairy impulse of minimal music as manifested in Terry Riley records like "Persian Surgery Dervishes" but Battiato's feel for melody and harmony is infinitely superior, one finding oneself adrift on these organic, divinely lyrical tracks is as though one was drifting down-river on a makeshift raft encircled by swallows.