Albums as unique as Lucio Battisti’s Anima Latina are rarely the product of one person’s/band single vision. It’s easy to forget how little by little Lucio was baiting his audience — mostly Italian and rarely big outside of mainland Europe — into letting him explore places his own influences had gone before. He did all this whilst using his background in Italian Canzone, finding ways to complement this new vision with entirely Italian chord progressions and song structures.
Lucio had always been a great Italian pop artist, gifted in writing some of the most endearing Sanremo-like song. However, by 1974, he had increasingly grown weary of writing songs that were overtly unthreatening. He wanted to directly confront what both his audience and what the fascistic government of Italy thought was appropriate for him to release.
Lucio wanted to create an album that would be the demarcation line between his then music and his vision of a future music. Lucio knew it was necessary for him to escape the walls he had built up artistically. In the past, to remain viable he would look towards the US and England for inspiration. To break down those barriers he knew he had to look elsewhere.
Around 1973, Julio and his longtime co-writer Mogol (the nom de plume for songwriter Giulio Rapetti) took a sojourn and decided to travel around South America, mostly around Brazil and Argentina. While traveling, he as a nascent listener, was just astounded by the rhythm and variety of music found in this continent. Returning back to Italy, looking at the music of his own country, both Italian folk and prog, they found a new light of inspiration in them as well. Add to this his increased interest in the synthesizer sound of Germany and of his own Italian brethren like Franco Battiato, he finally saw a way to create this new beacon of sound.
Truly, the most forward thinking album of the most forward thinking year in music, 1974’s release of Anima Latina or “Latin Soul” presents the kind of timeless music and heartfelt sound that can be conjured when we take some time to look beyond our walls.
The opening track prepares you for the rest of the album. If it sounds like Talk Talk, only decades before they existed, it’s because (for all intents and purposes) it did. If you released this album, in any year from 1974 onwards it would never sound out of that current time. So what’s to say about the album? This an album made up of all these wise sonic choices influenced by Lucio’s musical exploration.
Just look at “Anima Latina”, the iconic self-titled track, which takes the swing of samba and combines it with Lucio’s Mediterranean compositional chops. An immediate, gripping song, when those samba horns hit, they strike a nerve in your body in ways few music has before. Continuing on, there are tracks “Gli Uomini Celesti” — essentially an Italian folk song enhanced with ambient textures that dramatically explodes into a beat driven funk outro. “Anonimo” is almost the opposite of this: a slow burning soul-influenced half (full of electric piano and synth, acoustic guitar) that segues into a ramped up version of the intro full of Spanish/Gypsy music overtones.
Those “why haven’t they done that before” moments, are what makes this album so inspiring. Lucio uses such ideas throughout the course of the album to walk an expertly fine line between experimentation and accessibility. On the second side of the album, he increasingly keeps exploring more ways to combine his influences and push them further forward. “Il Salame” signals baroque mannerisms but uses massive synth sound spaces to throw you firmly into the future. Then there are tracks like, “La Nuova America” that employ a motorik-style beat to constantly bring in ways to take that beat places Kraftwerk, NEU!, Brian Eno/David Bowie or a funk band hadn’t done so yet — this was 1974, no sign of Station to Station or La Düsseldorf yet…
I would imagine it was Lucio’s love of music that allowed him to create an album such as this. “Machina del Tempo”, for example, just keeps overloading the listener with twists and turns of style/sound that would sound disjointed if made by other people not named Lucio Battisti. Lucio’s gift was this uncanny ability of keeping his songs structured and accessible. True musical geniuses are the ones who can find that balance of “difficult” effortlessly.
We might know, or guess at nowadays, that during his time Lucio heard some Jorge Ben, Milton Nascimento, or even in his own doorstep someone like Franco Battiato, or Fabrizio De André, and knew he couldn’t match their prowess, or single-minded experimentation, and said to hell with it. Lucio’s one ace in the hole was that he wasn’t encumbered to feign an English sound anymore. He wasn’t expected to push the ground experimentally. No one expected for him to take his deep knowledge of music from Lucio and push it beyond his Italian pop beginnings. But that he did…
Anima Latina remains timeless because it is as much his as it is ours. If you stick around with him albums like the next one La Batteria, Il Contrabbasso Eccetera or Io Tu Noi Tutti show him comfortably expand his sphere of wise musical experiments… alterna-disco, punk, funk, and more imagined worlds await you.
NOTE: This is a re-post of an older review. Older one has now been put to pasture.