Review: the dogs – “Post Mortem” (track for track)

The dogs the dogs is a bit like an object of desire.

The return (surprisingly) of the Band-Non-Band of Niccolò Contessa, nine years after the previous album has become an event for Italian indie music (according to some even the most anticipated album of the millennium).

Countess gives life to a work that breathes of authenticity and value. A disc that knows of a forecier – a rare and precious object, built with patience and dedication, but also with a disruptive and impetuous force.

In this work, a remarkable compositional maturity emerges. We are no longer in front of the Niccolò Contessa who explored the adolescent turbulence and the post-adolescent anxieties; The artist, now close to forty years old, appears more centered, but no less visionary. The songs of the album are full of meaning, often intimate and reflective, but do not give up on moments of powerful vitality. A perfect balance between the lightness of the introspection and the typical expressive strength of his writing.

The disc, produced by Contessa together with Andrea Suriani (who also dealt with the mix and the master), stands out for his essentiality. Without frills or market logic, dogs return with a job that focuses on the quality of music, away from prefabricated images or imposed trends. The songs are built with attention and patience, but at the same time full of energy. The choice not to overload the disc of complex productions, but to leave ample space for the voice and tools, makes it a decidedly authentic and intense work.

The album is a continuous alternation between moments of great emotional power and more reflective and intimate passages.

The final Hamletic question is: Niccolò Contessa is or is this his final chapter? Although the future is uncertain, what matters is that dogs are back with a record that is not afraid to face reality, who knows how to look inside and knows how to tell their evolution.

There are no definitive answers, but only a certainty: this album is a significant return, not only for the band, but for Italian indie music in general.

Track for track

1. Me
A questioning litany that addresses the “self” as a stranger. The song dismantles identity through a series of accusations without a precise recipient, as if the conscience had become a courtroom.

2. Black hole
A surreal portrait of the newspaper, in which banality turns into abyss. Social rules become grotesque constraints and the “hole” under the dress is an image of existential void rather than an allusion.

3. Cough coup
Here the pop song deconstructs: a cough, a flash or a regret to generate a text is enough. The song is a sort of nursery rhyme with a guitarrine at Smith. An emotional inventory in the form of a refrain, between irony and surrender.

4. Davos
An overview of a dispersed humanity: who goes to war, who on vacation, who preaches, who traffic. The title evokes the forum of global power, but the narration focuses on minimal, contradictory, human gestures. Musically it reminds me of something beck in the form and in the structure.

5.
A reflection on the permanent sense of guilt that accompanies the simplest gestures. The irony is thin, almost subdued: even eating outside or giving a coin becomes guilt.

6. FCFT
Acronym that sounds like an acronym for a new social religion. The song is a satire of performative normality: to do like everyone else, say what you have to say, satisfy everyone. But melancholy remains underground and all around there are post punk sounds.

7.Post Mortem
Instrumental. Intense, dense, dramatic. Almost a post -mortem Requiem!

8. Happy
The title is a deception: happiness is a mirage in a Kafkian landscape, dotted with failures, dysfunctions, autosugger. The reference to Kafka and Felice Bauer is not just literary: it is emotionally punctual. A almost new wave swing battery.

9. In the part of the world in which I was born
A ruthless syncopated list of uncomfortable truths. Between Autofuration and socio -cultural analysis, the song is a merciless radiography of western privilege and its narrative void.

10. Mother
Perhaps the most poetic song on the album: a maternal figure becomes cyclic archetype of birth, forgiveness, abandonment. The tone is from personal myth, between mysticism and childhood, all music almost funk.

11. Carbone
A sentimental relationship told as slow combustion. Love is consumed in silence, without striking gestures, in mutual indifference. Two strangers who persist in calling themselves love.

12. Dark
A passage on anxiety, the fear of the bottom, of the void. A pulled guitar and the Synths in the Spirum make a claustrophobic image of domestic life and an existence that always avoids the bottom to not really see itself.

13. Another wave
He closes the disc with an ambivalent image: the wave that overwhelms and then lets it breathe. It is a metaphor for life and trauma, but also of the desire to get up and, almost with obstinacy, to want to still.

To listen immediately

Me – Black hole – happy

To skip immediately

43 minutes intimate, suffered, attentive, to listen to.

Score: vote 8.00

Me – vote 8.00
Black hole – 7.50 vote
cough – 7.50 vote
Davos – 7.00 vote
Guilty – 7.50 vote
FCFT – 7.50 vote
Post mortem – 7.50 vote
Felice – 8.00 vote
in the part of the world in which I was born – vote 7.75
Mother – 7.75 vote
Carbone – 7.75 vote
Dark – 7.75 vote
Another wave – 7.75 vote

Tracklist