#quindi

This latest recording is very much in line with the artist’s catalogue. Indeed, we find ourselves nodding along to Alex Johnson’s take on 2024’s Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean, which he called, “eminently listenable, engaging and, if paid proper attention, engrossing — although not always comfortably.” The discomfort comes from the fact that lavishly backed jazz poetry is not our favorite genre; the engrossment comes in because Colussi does it very, very well.

The key is maybe, the way that FDM slips tension into its fluid ease, in keyboard stabs that vibrate so hard you see them double, in twitchy bass lines, in the uneasy lyrics that are, at once, suave and manic, seductive and threatening. “Beware of reverie, sentimentality, and of taking yourself to seriously,” whispers Victoria Cheong a.k.a. New Chance in “Beware,” standing in as Jane Birkin to Colussi’s Gainsbourg, an accessory to his cracked but effortless cool.

“Call Me the Author” starts in swipes of stringed instruments, a chamber music wrapping around Colussi’s oblique musings about artistic frustration and breakthrough. (For instance, “I started out as a dog, a dog that refused to bark, and then I became a bird, a bird that chose not to fly, and I was a bird that dug a hole deep down to the dirt to hide from the sky.”) It’s a song about kicking loose from self-imposed limitations, and perhaps the music, which blossoms extravagantly in the final moments, is another example.

“A Perfect Pair,” the single, tips into 1970s kitsch, with its giddy strings, its ingratiating melody, its sugar-dipped electric guitar riffs; I like it less than the others. Yet while the music cloys, the words are rather good, with knotty metaphors about love and race cars, delivered without sentimentality but with a genuine faith in love.  This is odd, but occasionally entrancing stuff.