Review: Contrasto – Politico Personale

The new Contrasto album, to use a technical term, is really a blast, but we already knew it before it was released, didn’t we? It was in the air, and have they ever disappointed our expectations in their 22 years of musical activity?
The cover of Politico/Personale is a black and white photo of an open suitcase that contains a variety of objects, and is evocative of what awaits us listening to the 18 songs hidden in the grooves of this vinyl. Because if from a purely musical point of view what we find is that typically Italian 80’s style punk HC, that has been able to reinvent itself up to now without ever losing a minimum of incisiveness, plus a couple of acoustic songs, born perhaps thanks to the influence of the side project of Contrasto, Labile Istante di Vuoto, at a lyrical-narrative level what awaits us is a journey. A journey that starts from the Resistance and arrives at Rojava, taking in all that political and existential subversive imagery that has gone through the history of Italy in the last 40 years. A story that Contrasto claim as theirs (ours) without falling into nostalgia or rhetoric as a veteran but rather telling its great human weight in the first place and the political potential from which we can still draw inspiration because still (especially) today it makes sense to get involved, dare, with the way things are, and play it for all it’s worth.
Throughout the album there are strong references, quotations, tributes to Prospero Gallinari, Mauricio Morales, Nullo Mazzesi, the activists of Prima Linea, the fighters of the YPG, Giovanni Pesce, Claudio Lavazza and Pasquale Abatangelo. All stories that Contrasto set to music with anger and poetry, bitterness and hope, because the most important thing is to be able to communicate, to remember a past that is like our present and future, that we thought it wasn’t there, before it falls in on us we must try to make it our own, even if we proceed from one defeat to another. But we are sure that there will be beautiful nights and better days, there will be times to live and intense glows!

Contacts:
www.contrastohc.com
contrastohc@gmail.com

Reviewed by Ombra Punx
Translated by Elvira Cuomo