Review Summary: Aliens are real and they love them some o' that trippy shit.
You need to have ambition rooting all the way down from your balls if you start your album of six two-to-three minutes’ long songs with a seventeen minute goliath. That long-ass bastard with a name so long it’ll be a lesser time-spender to just listen to it, that thing is what kicks off what might as well be the most trippy, but paradoxically enough the most meditative and vibrant Psych album ever, mostly thanks to its utter dismissal of organisation or structure.
Dedicato sounds as if it comes from the depth of cosmos on some psychotic alien’s spaceship that lost its course and he now plummets through the universe, gradually getting more insane as the time goes on, which eventually spirals into ceaseless screaming, depression and finally utter madness, during which he creates this monstrosity and has a brief hobby of making papier maché. This poor soul conceived the album that is
Dedicato, with what little grasp on reality or song-writing he had left.
It is strange that with all the mind-twisting, directionless, psychotic, near-improvisational headscratchery that was that first track, it doesn’t lose your attention for a single second. It goes on forever, but not once does it seem purposeless or running out of things to show. It is never boring. How can that be? I could only assume that you don’t have to keep up the song-writing pace if you don’t have any to begin with.
Following that opening beast is a fiver of music more straightforward tracks, but each still have that specific off-kilter, noisy, detuned oomph to them. It’s like listening to everything the opener was not. “Molto Alto” is a riveting blast, whereas “Susan Song” is a slow ballad, “E Dopo” feels a tad poppy, “Intervallo” is a little groovy and fun and “Molto Lontano (A Colori)” is just plain trippy. They are all completely different and they all feel like an exploration of something new, not just compared to this record, but newness in general.
It is not exactly clear as to who is behind Le Stelle, except for the name bearer himself, Mario Schifano. Apparently, this all-around artist made this album on a whim (the alien theory solidifies) without any goal or direction, which explains the odd flow and the individual aims of the songs. The album does seem like it is trying to shoot into every direction, but doesn’t know how to exactly, and end up sounding completely original just for how unaware their authors were. All charm, no harm.