GOMMALACCA

Recorded in 1998 and released the same year. The single taken off the album was the first track Shock in My Town.It would be apparent to anyone who knows me that I have come across this great artist through this site and its members.

I am surprised that this album is not mentioned more on the site with elements of prog,world,pop,rock and classical it is a wonderful of almagamation of styles which only be done by a talented musician such as Battiato. There is no one like Battiato and he is his own man with a distinctive style.

The majority of the album as sung in Italian of course with English being used only in a small section of the first track. Of his later albums this would be my favourite and has great songs with typical panache that is Battiato.

There is prog on this album. That is apparent on track 6 and what a great song Il Mantello De La Spiga ( The Cape and The Ear) Track 4 Il Ballo Del Potere ( The Power of the Dance) has elements of world music throughout and a great groove. Even a mention of the Australian Aborigine.

Three other tracks that I will mention are 8. Quello Che Fu ( prog) and great. Crunchy guitar with distortion,quiet verse and a whopper of a chorus. The first one Shock in My Town is pop fair but catchy and the last track is a homage to Shackleton the great Antartic Explorer and how he saved his crew when he set off to South Georgia in a what was basically a lifeboat and saved them all after their ship was crushed in the ice during the time of the great war in 1915.

Masterpiece and 5 stars without even having to ponder over this album. A must have for any Battiato Fan or anyone interested in truly original music. Also special mention must go to the cover. The simplest things can make for stunning visual presentation.

At the end of the 90s Battiato finally manages to obtain a fusion of his electro-pop vein and his prog and classical influences. Let me remind of the pyschedelic, electronic, krautrock and experimental albums of the 70s.

The result is a very pleasant album with some appeal for all the kinds of public that he has.

"Shock In My Town" has less hermetic and cryptic lyrics than usual. I like writing of this because Battiato has recently been fired from his political role in his Sicily for having said something "too clear": in an interview he said that the Italian parliament is full of whores, intending people who sells himself, abd the sentence has been used as pretest to fire him. Should he have used the language of his songs nobody would have had this opportunity for firing him. Back to music, this song has a background of classically arranged strings and electronics but the mood is dramatic, very far from his light pop of the 80s. There's something in this sing, maybe the repetition of chord passages "A- F" which reminds me to a long invective launched by another Italian artist, Giorgio Gaber, many years before: "Io Se Fossi Dio". Only the chords. The two songs are very different each other.

"Auto De Fe'" features an unusually heavy guitar but the chorus is very electronic instead. It's a song lighter than the first, even in the lyrics but it's surely not a pop song.Something which needs some listens to catch all the instrumental aspects inside it.

"Casta Diva" is the title of a song taken from the Bellini's opera "Norma". In the opera it's a prayer of a druid priestess. This song is very melodic and I don't see in the lyrics a clear reference to the opera, but consider that all I know of opera is based on Zeuhl so I can't really write of Bellini.

"Il Ballo Del Potere" (The Dance of the Power - intended as political power) it's a sarcastic parody of a "rain dance", speaking of moving from right to left then stop a while in the centre... then he speaks of rituals from Africa and Australia, I think to underline the different behaviours. However he confused a ritual from Papua New Guinea with Aussie Aborigens. The song has a lot of editing, loops, recordings and effects. Good song.

"La Preda"(The Prey) is very melodic but the passages are not trivial and I hear remains of the Battiato's krautrock period. Those two coexisting elements make it appealable for both the pop and the prog Battiato listeners. I won't comment the hermetic lyrics.

"Il Mantello e La Spiga"(The Mantle and the Ear) is the most appealing track for proggers, the one closer to the old Battiato. Based on minor chords, dark and with a rhythm that's slow and obsessive at the same time, like the "Rajaz" of Camelistic fame.

"E' Stato Molto Bello"(It has been very good) is another very good track. Slow and bluesy, I don't know why, it makes me think to Pat Metheny, probably for the background guitar in suaturation.

"Quello Che Fu"(Once It Was) Has initially a classical mood but is also a bit experimental. Luckily, his pop period has gained to Battiato a lot of fans who are used with his typical sound so that even a bit of experimentalism can be digested by his mainstream public.

Another lazy song with a rhythm similar to Metheny's Last Train Home is "Vite Parallele" (Parallel Lives).This tempo and the vocals are a Battiato trademark, but if you isolate those two elements, this can sound like a typical italian pop song.

"Shackleton"..I had a colleague with this surname, but I don't think it's dedicated to him...jokes apart, this is the most experimental track, including speeches, and telling a story without any hermetism. It's the southern version of Lord Franklin's story, at least is very similar, as story. Musically it doesn't have anything to do with the traditional(I think) made famous by Pentangle. With this song, understanding Italian helps a lot as you have effectively a story to follow, but I think that even without taking care of the lyrics, the 8 minutes of this song have something to transmit to the listener. This is the Battiato that I like more.

I can'tconsider this album as a prog masterpiece but it surely deserves all the 4 stars that I'm using to rate it. Was it made of "Shackletons" only, it would have been 5.

Franco Battiato is a legendary composer, multi-instrumentalist and singer out of Italy who has released over 40 studio albums alone let alone other recordings. So I really am not "up" to how his career has changed musically since the early seventies but I do consider his 1973 release "Sulle Corde Di Aries" to be a masterpiece. "Gommalacca" is from 1998 and I sought it out based on a lot of very complimentary reviews. My first couple of spins had me scratching my head as to why people considered it so highly but after a few more man I am 100% sold on this.

It reminds me of THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS with the experimental and artsy songs. Vocals of course are very different and it's almost all in Italian here but for some English bits. The other difference is that this record is very uniform in sound which I like plus Franco is the king of contrasting styles here on all but one track. Whatever Battiato did here it all works so well. He adds electronics, drums, keys, bass, vocals and guitar plus he arranged, composed and produced this record. And hold the presses! Gavin Harrison is his drummer here! What!? This is 1998 which had me searching as to when Gavin started playing on records and saw that he released his first solo album in 1997 with Mick Karn, Richard Barbieri and the legendary Dave Stewart. Man I'm learning stuff.

Back to "Gommalacca" and we get several vocalists helping out plus some extra guitar and piano. Oh and synths on three tracks as well besides Franco's input on all of the above. There's not a lot of English on here but that opener "Shock In My Town" is an exception with the title being repeated often. There's more Italian on here though as far as lyrics go. There's a surprising section where he kicks into a "Rock" mode out of the blue and that section becomes a contrast. My first top five. The other top four tracks are songs five to eight where we get this awesome section of music right in the middle. Now that closer also needs to be mentioned at 8 1/2 minutes the longest by far and a little different from the rest.

Easily 4 stars and I have such an appreciation for this man's talents.