Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso: ...E Via

BANCO DEL MUTUO SOCCORSO: ...E VIA (1985)

1) Notte Kamikaze; 2) Ice Love; 3) Black Out; 4) (When We) Touched Our Eyes; 5) To The Fire; 6) Mexico City; 7) Lies In Your Eyes; 8) Baby Jane.

With your permission, I will keep this one brief. For some reason, the «moody» twist of the self-titled Banco did not appear satisfactory — and just two years later, the band fell back on its «silly Italo-pop» schtick, except, this time, with an appropriately (for 1985) larger emphasis on big stu­pid electronic drums and «sci-fi» synthesizers. Results are predictable: a record that is just as dumb as Buone Notizie, but goes even harsher on the ears.

Summarizing: a total of 4 cretinous (yes, I need to drag out my thesaurus for this) «hot» electro-pop dance numbers — I can just imagine the Nocenzi brothers, with naked torsos, getting it on with those sexy portable synths!; one deeply bathetic power ballad that might as well have been written by Diane Warren; and three calmer, adult-contemporary numbers, the last one of them with a faint, distant echo of the band's fusion legacy (but at this point, that echo is pretty much undistinguishable from the domain of soft jazz muzak).

Additionally, most of the songs are delivered in English — never a forte of DiGiacomo's, and at this point, who really cares? I seriously doubt they managed to sell a single copy of this crap out­side the borders, where everybody had their own national crap at the time. (Not to mention that a single look at DiGiacomo's facial expression on that billboard would shoo away even the buz­zards). Somebody must have gone completely wild in the marketing department — or maybe singing in English over ear-splitting electronic drum backgrounds was all the rage in Italy circa 1985, which I doubt.

As is often the case on such of the lyrics, a few of the choruses are «formalistically» catchy, but usually in the form of «idiot catchiness» — if the Italian line about dancing with the protagonist all night long from ʽNotte Kamikazeʼ gets stuck in your head for a couple hours, nothing good will come out of it anyway. Nobody except for the most corrosively perverted Eighties' buffs need ever bother about locating this record — E Via, indeed. And yes, that's the wrong way you are pointing out there, signor DiGiacomo — thumbs down, all the way, never up or even side­ways.