CLIC

With this fourth album, FC takes things again a bit too far, this time in the hermetic direction. Exactly how can one veer from such perfec tion with his previous Aries album, to such impenetrable goo apposed on this slice of wax is beyond me. If I am a little harsh on this album, it is because of the contrast between the two, but also the many common points with its predecessor. This album will be the last one that can be attributed to his "group" as with following albums, both mainstays from Fetus, Mocchetti (guitars in general) and D'Adda will have left Battiato.

The best way to describe such an album would be an Ambient-Free-RIO, continuing the work started in the previous Ariès, indeed pushing it further, but in some ways making much less sense in terms of beauty of the music. The opening Memoria track has a superb jazz-rock & Riley (pardon the pun) electric piano part, but instead of capitalizing on it, Battiato veers into an improvised free jazz with No U Turn before returning to electric piano to end the piece, Its acoustic version occupies Mercato Degli Dei. On the flipside, the communist Propriedad Prohibida sounds like an excellent Tangerine Dream track, with the full works and a few discreet acoustic instruments to top it all off.

On the down side, Franco just imitates his previous great album and he seems to link senselessly parts of music together, gluing them arbitrarily (U Turn). There are moments that are relatively dumb and cringesome, like Rien Ne Va Plus or the extremely faint Cantiere or the dumb baroque collage pastiche of the closing track.

Starting with this album, but really taking off with the next album, Battiato will venture further in minimalism for the next few years, really expanding on what mentor Terry Riley did and will produce a string of hermetic album (who will wait a few more years before I'll see fit to review), before counter-plunging 180° into ugly pop crap in the 80's, therefore effectively always casting a shadow on the man's real aesthetics. In the meantime Clic simply didn't with me, and I can only urge you to start chronologically backwards from the Aries album towards the debut album. While still quite good per se, this one is only for minimalist freaks.