Federico Albanese : Blackbirds and the Sun of October
I must admit I feel regret. Not just toward my editor, whom I failed to deliver this review of Federico Albanese’s Blackbirds and the Sun of October to earlier, not just to Albanese himself for the withholding of the same, but also to myself for tarrying in spending the dedicated time with this record I have since its release. Life and politics always seem to get in the way, being both the matter of life and its distraction. Still, with a Huysmans novel in my lap, that old French master of naturalist prose, and this record playing throughout my home, it is hard not to consider my earlier time spent less wisely than I would have hoped.
This is an instrumental record, piano-driven compositions with light attendant orchestration. The fact that Albanese has done soundtrack work before is apparent near immediately; for some pieces, there is a missing component, a gap or aperture which in film would be filled by the movement and image and diegetic sound. Here, it is drama without often a driving melody to act as the central voice to provide a specificity of context to these pieces. This is a risky move; in soundtrack releases, there is the good faith that those spaces are gainfully filled by the film proper. Here, it is all suspension, the long-tail meditations and hovering sensibility.
As such it renders itself a keen record to read and write to. Again, this is not a knock: some music naturally wants to seize the fullness of your attention and imagination while others seek to attenuate it. Undercurrents, the masterpiece of Bill Evans in duo capacity, does not grip the mind the way Painkiller, an equal masterpiece by the very different Judas Priest, does—but this doesn’t diminish its greatness. While Albanese here does not ascend to the vaunted heights of the masters, these are still sumptuous pieces which split the difference between a deep and specific intimacy with a broader, more expansive feel.
There is a fascinating interplay between the more umbral depths of the strings in their long drones against the pinpricks of light of higher register piano notes, a sense that inverts itself when the the piano descends to desultory lows against which the strings keen like straining streams of light. It’s unclear whether this sonic sensibility informed the title of the record or if the concurrence of those is happy circumstance. Regardless, it creates a fruitful dynamic against which these quite rustic pieces, marked by stray lingering strands of folk melodies as opposed to the more architecturally complex typicalities of contemporary classical music, can sit and shimmer. Some instrumental music feels more poetic, making certain elliptical, evocative turns which stick in the mind like the sharp, clean, ambiguous images of great pensmen. Here, Albanese leans more novelistic, with pieces that feel like walking through rooms of a house noting the furniture and stray papers and items decorating the shelves and filling drawers, artifacts of a life.
Label: Sony
Year: 2025
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