IL DITO E LA LUNA

"When the wise man looks at the moon, the stupid looks at the finger". This album's title may have been inspired by this Zen sentence as "Il Dito e La Luna" means "The finger and the Moon". But "The finger and the moon" is also the title of a novel by Alejandro Jodorowski, so who knows?

The first relevant new about this album is that for the first time the lyrics aren't written by Luisa Zappa but by a former cabaret actor now horror novels writer, Giorgio Faletti who also had a successful appearance at the Sanremo pop festival as singer-songwriter. Honestly I don't see an improvement in the change of lyricist.

On the musical side there's still a lot of the old Branduardi in the chords sequences, and the country-blues of his worst albums of the 80s is not yet disappeared but this is one of his most mainstream pop and less progressive albums.

Looking at Branduardi's official website there's a remarkable thing about this album: you can find it in the discography but is omitted from the bio. The concept which links the songs was not bad: all the lyrics are about the circus and its artists and even though the lyrics are quite sad the music is almost based on major chords and the addition of 12-strings and steel guitars, other than making it sound like country-rock gives positive sensations.

It's a pity that the arrangements are so "American". Angelo Branduardi has always been interested by celtic music since his first albums (i.e. the italian cover of the British traditional "The Trees They Do Grow High" on his second album). Less America and more Ireland would have probably made it sound better.

In few words, this is a quite good pop album with few or no interest from a prog point of view and I think that even Angelo doesn't love it much. It's well played, the songs are a good "background listening", but nothing more.