The gods depart, the angry remain. It is the only Area album on which Demetrio Stratos is credited as a composer — almost every track here is his — and it is the last one he made with them. It is also the first without guitarist Paolo Tofani, the first whose words were not written by Gianni Sassi, and the first away from Cramps, the label that had built them. A band who had spent six years dismantling other people’s certainties turned the tools on their own, and called the record after the year it came out.

The short version

1978 Gli dei se ne vanno, gli arrabbiati restano! is the last Area album with Demetrio Stratos, released in 1978 on Ascolto, a CGD label, and produced by the band. Recorded at Sciascia Sound in Rozzano in April 1978, forty minutes. The line-up is a quartet: Stratos on vocals, Patrizio Fariselli on keyboards, Ares Tavolazzi on bass, Giulio Capiozzo on drums. Tofani had gone. Stratos wrote almost all of it, which he had never done before. Alan Goldsberg engineered the mix. That year the band played Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto in March and two dates in Havana in July, at the World Festival of Youth and Students. Stratos died in 1979.

1977

You cannot hear this record without the year before it. Area had been the house band of the Italian radical left, and by 1977 the festive, hopeful atmosphere that had carried the movement had dissolved; the turn into the eighties was already coming, though almost nobody could see it yet. Gianpaolo Chiriacò, who wrote the book on this band, argues that the will to break apart every ideological construction runs through every element of the album, and that you can be certain of it from the title alone — it points straight at the collapse of the myths raised, or dusted off, a decade earlier and by then drowned in the vortex of 1977. Tofani left, Sassi’s words went with him, Cramps went too. What remained was four musicians and their anger, which is precisely what the title says.

The sound

More agile and more structured than anything they had made before, and that is both the achievement and the complaint. The jazz fusion machinery is intact — Fariselli’s keyboards, Tavolazzi’s bass, Capiozzo’s drumming are all operating at the level you expect — but the pieces are shorter, the shapes are clearer, and the guitar-shaped hole where Tofani used to be changes the texture completely. Reviewers who love it call it well written, superbly played, formally impeccable and brilliantly of its moment. Reviewers who hold back say the same thing in a different key: what it lacks is the tortuous, experimental edge, the sense of a band walking off the map. Stratos is the reason to be here regardless. Writing the material himself for the first and only time, he sounds like a man with something specific to say rather than a voice being deployed.

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The songs

Il bandito del deserto opens at three minutes. Interno con figure e luci is the Fariselli and Stratos co-write. Return from Workuta and Guardati dal mese vicino all’aprile are where Chiriacò’s reading lands hardest — the titles alone tell you the subject is history and what it costs. Hommage à Violette Nozières closes the first side and is, for a lot of listeners, the track they come back for. Ici on dance! opens the second. Acrostico in memoria di Laio is Fariselli’s and the longest piece at over six minutes. FFF (Festa, farina e forca) is credited to Capiozzo, Fariselli and Tavolazzi — the rhythm section writing together, which tells you something about how this band worked. And Vodka Cola is the one that reads as prophecy now, a piece well ahead of the moment that produced it.

Reception and legacy

Area came apart after it. Stratos left, and Fariselli, Tavolazzi and Capiozzo brought in other musicians — Massimo Urbani, Pietro Tonolo, Sara Borsarini, Guido Guidoboni — but the band that mattered was finished. Stratos died in 1979. Fariselli is the only person to appear on every Area record, and he is the one who brought them back, in 1992 with Tavolazzi and Capiozzo and again in 2010 with Tavolazzi and Tofani. There is a coda worth knowing. Preparing the reissue forty years on, Fariselli played the master and found it was not the record he remembered — he had helped mix it, the sensations were printed on his memory. The engineers checked: the tape is perfect. Nothing had deteriorated. Things had simply changed.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and not the place to start. Hommage à Violette Nozières first. Then Vodka Cola, and think about when it was written. Then Acrostico in memoria di Laio, for Fariselli. Then Guardati dal mese vicino all’aprile. Arbeit macht frei and Crac! are where you begin with Area, and Maledetti is where the experiment goes furthest. This is the sound of the door closing: a band without their guitarist, without their lyricist, without their label, in the year the movement they belonged to stopped believing itself — and their singer writing every word of it, for the only time.

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