- The eponymous Rat is neither poet nor rodent. Nor, despite his lucid description, can he fly. No, Rat was in fact a homeless 15-year-old whose baby-faced delinquency became the subject of the grim 1984 documentary film, Streetwise. Context can be a powerful force, though, and far away from the images of drug abuse and child prostitution that beset their original utterance, the words suspired at the beginning of "Rat's Poem" take flight in earnest.
They do so in an azure of real beauty. Wind-gusts and birdsong, wolf-howls and splashes—nature sets the scene for a duet of pizzicato and tremolo strings to make nimble over an overarching cadence that grows more stirring by the chord change. Over broken but measured beats, claps and a delicately tapped e-piano, it's a dreamlike sally that constitutes the veteran Paolo di Nola's second release on his own Panacustica label.
Last year's debut was enough to catch the attention of Prins Thomas who participates this time with one of his finest mikses in a long while. The drumming is driven in a controlled way; the bass plays a pleasantly simple funk and washy guitar melodies make for the Balearic as the Norwegian captures the mood perfectly in his up-a-gear version. The ambit here is too grand to be boxed in by four-to-the-floor, and so the Citta Dei Mottori (Italian for Detroit, I believe) mix sounds decidedly limited by comparison. But really it's a minor dip in a record that soars.
Tracklist A1 Rat's Poem
A2 Stay Gold - Rat's Poem (Cittá dei Motori Mix)
B1 Rat's Poem (Prins Thomas Mix)