Review: DIMARTINO – “The unlikely flood of the Oreto”

There is a form of aristocratic coyness in the way Antonio Di Martino returns, and seven years is a long enough wait to make the gesture something deliberate.

“The unlikely flood of the Oreto” it is the fifth studio album, first as a soloist after the long association with Colapesce which redefined the public perception of both. That partnership was a contract with pop, with synthesis, with immediate effectiveness. This record is a contract with himself.

The image that governs everything is the Oreto: a small torrential river that starts cleanly near Monreale, travels twenty kilometers and flows turbidly into the sea in Palermo, subject to the growing drought of contemporary Sicily. Its flood is, by definition, unlikely. It is there that Dimartino positions his narrative, in the possibility of an overflow that no one expected and of a path that fills with weights, which becomes an urban landfill before reaching the sea. The title functions as an existential metaphor and a statement of method together.

The opening single, River goldintroduces the character of a gold prospector immobile in the middle of the current, paralyzed by the meaning of his search. It has the specific weight of good poetry, not social media lyricism. Roberto Cammarata's production, guitar arpeggio with a popular flavor and mellotron in the background, serves the text without competing with it and establishes the coordinates of everything that follows: minimalism, never embellished beyond what is necessary.

Dimartino inhabits his own fragility, restoring an almost ontological weight to the word. The sound economy is conceptual and coherent throughout the ten songs, silences, dense light, countercurrents. The care and intentional slowness build a demanding listening experience that does not grant easy access points, and does not even seem to want to grant them. The record speaks to those who want to listen, not to those who pass by.

Musically Dimartino inhabits a cultured pop that flows through folk atmospheres, sober orchestrations, sound details built to sediment. Italian songwriting is in there, from Modugno to Battisti, without anyone being explicitly mentioned. Among the songs there is Water, where is it?which transforms one of García Lorca's most evocative poems into music: the river that asks where it goes, and gets no answer. In the context of the record, that unanswered question is perhaps the most honest moment of the entire project.

The reflection on time and the objectives we pursue is posed intelligently, without rhetorical consolations. The ten songs hold together as a unitary project.

The Oreto rarely floods, and when it does the water takes with it everything it has collected along the way, not just what it wanted to transport.

SCORE: 7.75

TO LISTEN NOW

Contemplating the sky through your fingers – Wonderful unconsciousness – Petrichor

TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY

Nothing. It enchants and envelops.

TRACKLIST

1) The gold of the river –
2) Contemplate the sky through your fingers
3) Wonderful recklessness
4) Maredolce
5) Water, where is it?
1) Empty shells
2) Petrichor
3) Flowing of the banks
4) Conrad
5) Story of my anger

THE DISCOGRAPHY

2010 – Dear teacher we have lost
2012 – It would be nice to never let go, but letting go every now and then is useful
2015 – We need a country
2017 – A rare world (with Fabrizio Cammarata)
2019 – Aphrodite
2026 – The unlikely flood of the Oreto

VIDEO