Japan Lover

NOTA BENE: Il Post è stato scritto IERI sulla versione del blog in inglese. La traduzione segue questo iato temporale. 

E dunque... ECCOCI.

This early morning. Finally. Mine. Thank God.

Oggi non sono stata PER NIENTE produttiva al lavoro e la gente aveva in faccia quell'espressione che mi riservano quando sanno che non c'é nulla da fare... per fortuna mi vogliono bene anche per questi lati del mio carattere.

Con papà eravamo in una sorta di tregua non esplicitata, per la quale non mi avrebbe cazziata, sapendo che oggi, non importa cosa avessi tentato, avrei avuto SOLO UN PENSIERO  in testa.

E nel cuore.

E da qualunque altra parte fisica o metafisica.

Ieri abbiamo tenuto un barbecue dai miei non appena siamo tornati da Napoli (vi dirò di più in seguito…) e come è arrivata mezzanotte ho provato a cercare su itunes Italia se ESSO fosse già presente.

NO.

E dunque me ne sono filata a letto sapendo che stamani mi sarei svegliata con le galline: sia perché quando dormiamo da me per tornare a casa di  Karim a Milano DOBBIAMO... e sia perché...

Insomma... c'era l'appuntamento con ESSO.

Sapevo che alle 5 avrei aperto gli occhi comunque.

Hands All Over creators. Thank you. You made a masterpiece.

SI.

Dopo 14 mesi di attesa (sono partiti non appena i Cuccioli sono volati tra le braccia di Mutt Lange in Svizzera a Luglio 2009) ho potuto FINALMENTE ascoltare Hands All Over.

Già, perche se si esclude Last Chance (una versione live dai concerti dell'anno scorso che la cara Margherita mi costrinse ad ascoltare, con mio successivo scorno durato per mesi…) non ho MAI ascoltato niente, né live né da studio, di nessuna canzone che non fosse già presente sotto forma di singolo in vendita; eppure avevo maree di versioni di molte canzoni, e tutti i demo dell'album; ma no... non ho mai voluto ascoltare NULLA prima che TUTTO fosse acquistabile.

In Italia, la versione DELUXE dell'album è disponibile da oggi.

Domani scaricherò da iTunes USA ANCHE la versione americana (è carino che gli Italiani abbiano una bonus ghost track in più rispetto agli americani - devo controllare cosa hanno i Giapponesi che nessun altro ha - una cover SPLENDIDA di  “A Crazy Little Thing Called Love!!)

Sui leaks, sapete bene ormai quanto io li consderi ABOMINEVOLI, quindi è ovvio che nemmeno se mi minacciassero ascolterei MAI un leak in vita mia.

This is Hotel Vesuvio in Naples. Look up. Somebody was THERE...

I leaks pirata mi disgustano e coloro che ne fruiscono guadagnano TUTTO il mio disprezzo.

Ma ad essere sincera non ho nemmeno colto le occasioni che gli stessi Cuccioli hanno predisposto per ascoltare il disco in anteprima.

Non sono andata nemmeno su MySpace.

Perché?

Perchè sono serissima riguardo alla mia musica preferita: e sapevo che già avrei comunque comprato l'album (l'ho preordinato ovunque... appena è stato possibile).

Nel mio mondo il primo ascolto di un disco di uno qualunque dei miei artisti preferiti è un momento quasi sacro, che proteggo e riverisco e che per me somiglia sul serio alla nascita di una nuova creatura... attendo la gestazione, attendo il parto, e mi godo i primi suoni come un miracolo.

Credo che in questo io viva la situazione esattamente come gli artisti che creano il disco.

And with that I mean beside us, maybe? 

E dunque... è NATO.

Farete bene a stare attenti perché ho ascoltato quest'album TUTTO il giorno (parola) e sono pronta ad inondarvi con le mie impressioni.

Il conto adesso è a 10 ascolti totali, ma continua e quindi possiedo ogni elemento e ciascun elemento ho ponderato per iniziare una vera e propria recensione.

Non ne ho lette in giro: primo perchè non mi interessano - sono per lo più scritte da gente o troppo giovane ed inesperta o troppo anziana e indietro sui tempi) e poi perché ho da sola la necessaria cultura musicale per capire di dischi da sola, grazie  .

E allora... venite con me in questo mondo speciale fatto di note e voce di seta.

Sicuramente potreste essere portati a pensare che siccome la recensione è SU DI LORO, e fatta da una fan come ME, l'impressione non potrà che essere positiva... Ma sbagliate di grosso: se posso essere portata a giudicarli DIVERSAMENTE, nel caso è perché utilizzo un metro PIU' ESIGENTE.

Già, perchè se il privilegio di essere tra i miei artisti preferiti ha tra i lati buoni quello che io comprerò a scatola chiusa QUALUNQUE cosa produrrai, la parte negativa è che per mantenere il privilegio io mi aspetto costantemente il massimo ed un costante miglioramento.

Ed allora... inziamo?

NOTA BENE: LASCERO' LA RECENSIONE IN INGLESE. In coda tornerò ad utilizzare l'Italiano per le notizie solite. 

Hands All Over. The only thing my iPod will play for a month.

Questa è la recensione per il disco dei Maroon5 “Hands Al Over” Review (Deluxe version, with the European addition of A Crazy Little Thing Called Love”).

Hands All Over - 1 -

Being foreign to their language, I have someway the plus of being able to perceive “at first listening” only the musicality of a record, because it takes enough to me to pay less attention to the words as they’re spoken, and go with the flow of the notes ONLY.

Then I get to evaluate the lyrics, to see if they match the first feeling of emotional spectrum given out by the music.

You gotta understand the music has many layers of perceptibility: there is the esthetic value of a genre of sound, and then there is the proper “caracter and style” of a determined series of musical choices, instruments that better than others underline specific feelings (like, for instance, cellos which suggest melancholy and drama, violins which are romantically charged for their elusive sounding caress, distorced guitars that suggest force and rebellion, and so on and on…).

A great record twists with these elements of sound in a way all of them seems just FITTING the syle of the artist, the meaning of the songs, the vocal style the songs are delivered in, and the way the ones who heard it (not casually) naturally set up on the same patterns of feelings suggested by that music.

Hands All Over - 2 -

Independently, often, from the ability they may actually have to understand the spoken language of the songs.

This is a concept Mutt wanted the boys to get, and this is exactly what I am used to do since I firstly got into foreign music (age 7) and which I was trying to explain to you when I started saying at first listening I try not to pay attention to words (which doesn’t mean after I don’t CAREFULLY listen and evaluate them all, of course).

It’s a chemistry in progress and stabilization and once you grab it… “BAM”: you have something special in your hand.
Put your hands all over there then  …

Sadly people are often just too shallow to get such richness behind real music (I’m not talking about pre-made shit the charts are fullfilled with…).

Musically speaking, the work of Mutt Lange on this record is AWESOME.

Hands All Over - 3 -

It’s a proper journey into a love story, with all emotions covered, and that is why the ORDER the songs are put into the record matters.

In fact, if in 2002 we had “Songs About Jane”, it’s hard not to think this record might have been called “Songs About Becky (Ginos)”.

It’s actually natural: Adam puts in songs all of his own life, and the most important thing happened to him in the times he did write those songs (and I have no trouble placing among those also the lyrics for Gotten he gave to Slash for their collaboration, because I can totally see that song right after “How”, or before “Just A Feeling”, because the lyrics TOTALLY are from the same times, sure…) MUST have been Becky.

Sure, doesn’t mean all songs are totally or always about her… but camon. Most of them surely are.

Adam uses songwriting as a therapy to heal his heart and to find a way to escape and move forward from the past.

Hands All Over - 4 -

It’s one of the most precious outputs of being a songwriter, and that’s what makes him an artist in the first place: he colors his world through the nuances of his life filtering it: and allow us to sneak in and see what we can find that speaks about ours too.

And from all counts, that therapy worked again (he’s all happy now, isn’t he?  ): moved on, found new love, ready to see if what he learnt from the feelings that inspired THESE songs will produce something new after (I so hope… an happy album talking about marriage and kids? That’d be adorable… but it’s not here that I should talk about it  …).

The spectrum of HAO, and now we’re back there, covers magnifically and deeply the way a man moving into his 30s had to handle the difficulties of finding a way to keep a meaningful relationship working.

And failing at it (gaining a new maturity from that failure, throughout pain you grow up, right?).

I can already imagine that many will complain about lacking of “sexual inputs” in these bunch of songs.

Hands All Over - 5-

Beside the fact that their sexual style still there, I think it’s only NORMAL for the focus to be on more emotional bits than merely sexual ones.

When you move from 20 to 30, somehow you get that the sexuality is a powerful and fundamental thing in a relationship, but there’s all the rest that actually puts and keeps people together (it goes alone that if sex is not there, there’s NOTHING to build from the start… it’s just that at 30 you give that for given out, you don’t need to detail it so carefully anymore…).

And in this record, you get a couple of right-on-point notes from Adam about that, like rings he cannot give away, the fact he was able to love without wanting anybody to change, but never had the same vision from the counterpart, and the awesome confession that “Even if I don’t know nothing about love, I don’t mind dying trying to…”.

It’s an emotional path a truly romantic (yes, TRULY) man has walked onto, got taken up, got trashed down, tried it back and forth, and then realized that sometimes you met the right person at the wrong time, or the wrong person at the right time.

Hands All Over - 6-

And all you can do about that… is save what you had learnt, and use it when you will next be able to.

There’s a burning passion in these songs, but differently from their previous records, it’s a more meditative kind of passion, and saying that, it’s clear that it’s an even deeper kind of passion, because it summonizes up to sexuality and physicity, all the affectionate and more adults accents to the word “passion”.

But let’s get back at the songs, musically first.

Mutt Lange was able to give coesive power to the numbers of influences Maroon5 always had on display.

It’s what makes me love them more for, but at the same time is exactly what prevents them from being worldwide and completely taken and accepted.

It’s like you can’t put them in an easy box, and this destroys the chance of having them covering the most commercial territory with ease.

Hands All Over - 7 -

It’s laughable to call them “too commercial”: they are far from that, and in fact even trying to be fully commercial, they would simply not reach the wanted outcome.

They CAN’T be commercial in full with such a rich and complicated sound (complicated in the sense of a too far reach).

To get the beauty of this record, you should actually be at the same time a REAL fan (not an occasional fan) of: pop, rock, indie, dance, clubbing, R&B, Soul and even Country.

For instance, out of all those influences, I’m only cold about Country.

And so, unsurprisingly, even if I do hear that it’s a beautiful song (it truly is), my last favourite (let’s say a 4 out of 5) is the Lady Antebellum’s duet.

But that’s MY taste: as you will see later in the precise review, I find the duest awesome, and the song warm and delicious.

It’s just that I don’t really feel the Country style, unless you are not called Neil Young.

And so I imagine what someone into only pop or only rock or only soul could think of this record.

The musical layers of this album are extraordinary clean and polished, but there’s no overproduction AT ALL and that’s one of the most amazing achievements of Mutt there.

Simplicity means elegance.

Especially right now that we are submerged by so much sonic tricks that hearing a song resembles something you should do while you float in the space.

Nothing wrong with that, except that this is an intimate feeling album, something that one should listen while living on planet Earth without wishing to belong to Vega.

Old fashioned?

Maybe, if old fashioned means BETTER than the average and especially better than the CURRENT TIMES average (which is pretty awful).

Mutt Lange brought off Maroon5 maximum versatility and honesty.

The result is a tight collection of songs that are EACH actually worthy of a single release (and also that is gonna cause trouble).

But the real thing is that each song gains more sense and value if listened exactly before and/or after the one that preceeds/follows.

It’s a story.

In chapters.

And all chapters have a great groove or sonic connotation that show how talented as musicians they are.

Then there’s Adam.

His way to be expressive with his voice has reached a full maturity too.

It’s intriguing, because years of touring have actually thinned his voice (he should so much take care of it… but I guess to make him stop eating chocolate and drinking coffee is not on the plans… like it isn’t having him doing daily streching excercise for vocal chords…oh, well  … its’ what every singer experience… see Bono, which has the same kind of thin voice), but as a singer he’s growing into stratosphere now.

He can give depth to any sentence in any song  just by slightly changing the timbric value, the tonal range, the uptempo or the downtempo like you can really perceive the feeling he was meant to translate into those sung lines.

And what really is fantastic is that when he knows he can’t stretch due to overuse of voice, he changes the melody to mantain STILL the emotional value of the verse sung, even in the total change of key and or dynamic.

Total POWER-ness of vocal ability.

TOTAL.

And Adam”s at the top of his expressivity in this album.

He truly sings his soul out and I was sure he would have since after I firstly heard Gotten.

If that was an indication of the album (because that was surely a lyric for this album), I knew I was ready to have magic in this record.

And I have.

The album starts from what’s MORE Maroon5 style and then it starts to departure (it’s not a departure actually, more like a developing), song after song, but delicately, so that is actually like you catch a flower of many layers (a rose?) blossoming and open up hour after hour to reveal all most beautiful colors and a total-ness to it.

Hands All Over - 8 -

At the same time, you get a clear storyboard: you have a previous relationship that breaks, which is Misery actually, with its perfect uptempo beat and the charmingly pain of Adam that sighs at you by maintaining his totally cool self as per usual (I tend to believe that actually both Misery and Give a Little Moreare among the last songs that he wrote off the bunch… for some reason the kind of depth there is more easy going, the level of intensity of music and lyrics is lovely, but nowhere as near to what will happen after. Which is why I believe none of these two are about Becky not even remotely. But it’s a guess, of course… it comes off from analyzing a song just like I would with a poem  ).

Then you get the always on the prowl lover has started to move on and is in search of something new.

It starts with sex as per usual, because of course the first thing has to be physical… but in the groovy, very 70′s like Give A Little More the dance-y vibe already sublimates a moment of romance in disguise. I love the lyrics because as usual Adam’s able to depict so well an inmost moment of inner struggle within himself.

It’s like he TRIES to not get involved, but if you listen to this album, and even summonize it up with everything he has written about his life before, you actually know that he  is actually on the perpetual search for a soulmate.

Somebody, you will learn it after, “able to slow him down”.

This honesty is almost a double killing weapon.

But it produces great songs.

What is great about the starting up of the album, is that the songs progress as for greatness in sound and evolution as the story of this man in perpetual love trouble develops.

But you’re gonna be surprised by the way this time he’s gonna treat his outputs there.

Third song, and one of my very favorites here arrives.

Hands All Over - 9 -

Stutter has a totally amazing beat, and an infectious melody, with some genius changes of rhythmic choices and a beautifully sung main line. And then there’s that “Ss–SSs-Stutter” way he has to sing it that makes me go all awing.

It’s a song that has some resounding electronic beat but without anything of the cold gimmicks that have transformed the charts worldwide in the same song repeated by dozens of different singers (that anyway sound all the same thanx to AutoTune).

It’s modern without being fake.

And it depicts interactions of loving games awesomely.

I also love that Adam defines (and not only in this song, just because as I said this is an album that develops a story in CHAPTERS) the way this woman makes him realize he’s in dangerously spreading love mood by the term “shudder”: it means shaking, but in a way that implies someway terror along.

This is VERY psychological and again, crystally clear honest from him.

He WANTS to fall completely in love and being able to really give it up all for it BADLY: but at the same time, that sense of vertigo terrifies him.

I’m sure Catullo and his Odi Et Amo (or U2 along “With or Without you”which was inspired by it) somewhere up above looks at Adam and thinks “We know the feeling, buddy…” Love terrifies males as much as it is needed wildly by them to feel a sense of belonging finally.

I can say that after all the listening I would have SURELY picked up Stutter as first single.

It’s Maroon5 in total but unlike Misery it’s an happy song from top to bottom, in the sense not only the music is happy, but also the words are.

It’s a superb pop rock song.

Just flawless.

And with Stutter we are in that moment when love starts to match up with passion… the hesitations of Give A Little More are kinda bypassed, and the man is well trapped. Hear the wonderfully charming beat and a smile should appear on your face: again brilliant work in matching a feeling from the first note to the last word, but in a very classy, not banal way.

It’s a GREAT song.

Hands All Over - 10 -

From the fantasy world of expectations in Stutter, we move on and we haveDon’t Know Nothing: our lover has a problem in giving also the requested SOUL after he’s starting to give all of his heart to this demanding new girl. Fancy how males don’t get that for females the two things are THE SAME…

This song is very 80′s sounding, not in the wave of Duran Duran or Electronic synthetizers: this song is very 80′s Lionel Ritchie and Stevie Wonder, groovy and flamboyant, and has that retrò nuance that matches its shortness awesomely.

There’s a dreamy feeling that stays after listening to it, like all these questions about this relationship are staying within our guy after a bad dream, or a sleepless night; something you cannot yet place fully in the reality or in the subconscious of him.

This one still a hopeful kind of song, in the sense yet nothing seems lost.

But it’s about to change, and again the sound of the next song is a further layer on the painting that is this record (Kanye West may be more able to convey the links between music and figurative arts, but the fact is Maroon 5 do it as well without saying it… maybe even without acknowledging it  ).

Never Gonna Leave This Bed is the ballad that fits rightly as the middle approaches.

It’s reflective and the passion arises as some quarrel has apparently taken place between the boy&girl. The melody is softening but titillating.

The chorus is like a litigious yet totally lovingly argument that slows down and gets them back from discussion to a make-up bed.

You start to “feel” about this relationship: and it’s someway clear that in all that, the most vulnerable one, although not the most outspoken is definitely the one who wears pants.

You get that she is trying to rush him, but maybe she doesn’t get how involved he’s already, because she cannot understand how important for him is the way she’s able to “slow his demons down”.

Point is that the two conflicting ways of males and females keep collide “So you say GO, it isn’t working, and I say NO it isn’t perfect  so I’ll stay instead…”.

When the ballad starts its hypnotic prayer at the end, you really lie beneath a thundering storm of affection that risks to vanish in uncomprehensible pain… and the way it’s sung makes you really be part of all that.

Taking side.

Wishing along.

Reviving times when maybe YOU had to feel that.