Bachelite

Bachelite is the second album of the Reggio Emilia-based Offlaga Disco Pax.

The record opens with Superchiome, a song dedicated to one Carlotta, nicknamed precisely Superchiome for her red and orange hair. We then find Ventral, the album’s first single, dedicated to the Soviet jumper Volodymyr Jaščenko, capable in 1978 of jumping 2 meters 35 with the ventral method, a technique now superseded by the more modern Fosbury style.
The next episode narrated by Max Collini is Where did I put the Golf?, where the removal of a used Golf leads to a small folly, and to steal the car from the parking lot removals under the eyes of three traffic policemen. In both of these songs, politics is the main source of metaphors; in contrast, it is placed at the center of Sensible, where the crimes of the black terrorist couple Francesca Mambro and Giusva Fioravanti are evoked. In addition, also in the song Sensible, the album Abbiamo pazientato 40 anni. That’s enough! by the punk group Disciplinatha. Years later the issue will be the basis of the assault suffered, on December 14, 2013, by Max Collini at the hands of Dario Parisini of Disciplinatha backstage at a Massimo Volume concert.

Politics is then mixed with spectacle, in the Reggio Emilia of Lungimiranza; the PCI is mentioned as the organizer of a concert in an ARCI club, where a promising singer-songwriter (whose name the group does not want to reveal, although the most plausible hypothesis is that it is Vinicio Capossela) and his sound engineer (one thinks the reference is to Luciano Ligabue) perform to the general indifference of the audience.
The past is also the protagonist of Cioccolato IACP, where memories of youth among the working-class houses melancholically complement Robespierre, from the previous record; in fact, the characters from the single come to life, from “the friends from the campetto who went from Marlboros straight to heroin” to the unfortunate Barbara (to whose story the line “the toblerone, does anyone know why” was referred).
The surreal metaphors and entanglements with the group’s leftist political ideals are then expressed in an anthem (Stop!) to Chirocephalus marchesonii, a shrimp that lives in Lake Pilate alone, brought to symbolize the struggle against the system because of its attempts to escape from its natural habitat, systematically blocked by the Marches foresters, and with Onomastics where the Reggio Emilia stronghold of the PCI is expressed with a list of alternative names to the classic “names of moonlight saints,” bringing to mind various myths of socialist thought, recited over a haunting bass line accompanied at times by the saxophone of Andy of Bluvertigo.
Twenty Minutes concludes the album, a melancholy remembrance of his dead father, which runs through a long phone call from an old friend of his.

more on wikipedia

TRACKS

1. Superchiome
2. Ventrale
3. Dove ho messo la Golf?
4. Sensibile
5. Lungimiranza
6. Cioccolato I.A.C.P.
7. Fermo!
8. Onomastica
9. Venti minuti

Listen in the library

Band members
Enrico Fontanelli – bass, keyboard, synthesizer, drum machine, piano
Daniele Carretti – guitar, bass
Max Collini – vocal, lyrics

Other musicians
Francesco Donadello: acoustic Bass in Ventrale
Deborah Naomi Walker: cello in Sensibile
Jukka Reverberi: vocal in Cioccolato I.A.C.P. and Fermo!
Nicola Manzan: violin in Cioccolato I.A.C.P.
Andy – sax in Onomastica