ART POP MUSEUM

Exit is the second album by Museo Rosenbach. It was recorded between 1998 and 1999 and released in 2000 on the Carisch label with a new line up featuring founder members Alberto Moreno (bass) and Giancarlo Golzi (drums, percussion) along with Andrea Biancheri (vocals), Marco Balbo (guitar), Marioluca Bariona (keyboards) and Sergio Cossu (keyboards). If you expect from this work something similar to the band’s 1973 album Zarathustra I fear you’ll be disappointed since here there's no much left of the old Museo Rosenbach and the overall sound is probably closer to the elegant pop of Matia Bazar (a band which featured in the line up both Giancarlo Golzi and Sergio Cossu) than to seventies prog... Anyway, according to the band, it’s a concept album sui generis that tells about the uncertainty of evaluating things, the impossibility of giving a definitive judgement, in history as in daily events and the artwork by Rudy Camponovo tries to express this incertitude...

The opener “Exit” is a short intro to the album with a good guitar arpeggio and obscure lyrics about the need to find a way out from boredom and daily grind... Then, with “Il terzo occhio” (The third eye) the music turns to a smart pop-rock sound while the lyrics conjure up an emotional labyrinth where there’s a cage at the end of every alley you take and where you get lost between mystic fantasies and unknown tunnels, under the look of a third eye that can’t see the truth any more...

“In Equilibrio” (In balance) is a melancholic piece evoking the vibrant memories of the time spent with a missing person as a voice, lighter than silence, says that it’s too late for regret... Then it’s the turn of “Love”, a calm, bitter-sweet song about a broken relationship and the sense of an exasperated, pointless challenge that takes pain into account...

“Tuareg / Abbandonati” (Tuareg / Abandoned) is a good piece describing poor, starving people in the desert, shepherds that lead their flock of sheep to town... An invocation rises, an exhortation to save the children from war and famine before it’s too late! Then, the following “Illuse le intenzioni” (Deluded intentions) describes in music and words a tormented relationship filled with cheating and charms, pain and pleasure...

 

The long, complex “Il re del circo” (The king of the circus), in my opinion, is the best track on this album and tells about the war in the ex Yugoslavia. Here the vocalist plays the role of a merciless sniper, king of an opaque and scary circus that stages blood and madness while time stands still under a rain of tears and bullets... Next comes the evocative “Koln Raid” that conjures up the images of a love story under the bombs in a German city during World War II.

An instrumental version of “Exit” leads to the last track, “Un porto nel sole” (A port in the sun), a suggestive piece that ends the album with Mediterranean flavours, hope and expectations...

According to a recent interview with Alberto Moreno on It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine (that you can read HERE), ‘Exit’ turned out to be an album not perfectly in line with progressive orthodoxy. I recognize that the songs on this album did not have the epic-symphonic structure of the previous one, because they wanted to tell a different, more intimate dimension. It is also true that the arrangements are more pop than prog, but this is due to a perhaps too long preparation phase that allowed us to go back to the arrangements several times with the result of curbing the creative momentum and innovative settings. But I must add that, as an author, I do not consider ‘Exit’ structurally different from ‘Zarathustra’...

On the whole, I think that this is a good album that could be of some interest for collectors and fans, even if the music is not what do you probably expect from this band.

You can listen to the complete album HERE