Scuru Cauru

Scuru Cauru, Crimi's second album, kicks off with the bubbling of a water pipe and a vague background ditty suggestive of a radio playing. A match strikes, a cough resonates and already we are in the second track, ‘Stiddi !’, with Crimi's soulful Sicilian singing bringing in the dawn. Gradually bass drums kick in, followed by some melancholic 80s-style synth lines like dilating rays of light. It's morning in the backstreets of Palermo (or Oran) and one is still all hungover from the night before. This is music for a Sunday afternoon; music to unwind to. Scuru Cauru is rather a good album, for what it's worth, though one misses the full-on Algerian rai riffs of the previous album, Luci e Guai. Still, the close-plucked electric guitar, as in ‘A Sira’, has a kind of improvised, meandering Maghrebian air to it. I'm not the biggest fan of Crimi's vocal style, though it often hits the nail on the head, and at least doesn't degenerate into mainstream R&B cliché. If I can venture one more critique, the album begins very promisingly, spinning a powerfully atmospheric web, but the suspense tapers off around halfway through. Closing track, ‘Lu Focu Di La Paglia’, brings in a nice touch of brass, ending on a traditional Sicilian note.