Vinicio Capossela

★★★★ Ballate Per Uomini E Bestie WARNER/LA CUPA. CD/DL/LP Welcome to the 21st-century Middle Ages. After Canzoni Della Cupa warned of darkness on the edge of town, Capossela digs deep to face down “moral, ethical and linguistic” plagues sweeping the world in the “technologically developed Middle Ages”. Musically it harks back to distant times, but welcomes friends from the east – the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra (sounding as lush as Stokowski and as unhinged as Sun Ra) – and the New World (Marc Ribot). Lyrical inspiration ranges widely, from Oscar Wilde’s Ballad Of Reading Gaol, John Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and the tale of a giraffe that ran free in Imola in 2012. As the title (Ballads For Men And Beasts) suggests, our relationships with fauna in the Anthropocene era loom large, yet the impressive closing trio that culminates in La Lumaca (The Snail) evinces optimism, a way out of this corruption. One can only hope. David Hutcheon