Before Osanna existed there was a Naples band called Città Frontale. Their teenage keyboard player left to join Balletto di Bronzo, Elio D’Anna arrived from the Showmen, and what emerged in 1971 was Osanna. When Osanna fell apart in 1974, the two who stayed behind — singer Lino Vairetti and drummer Massimo Guarino — put together a new six-piece and, with a certain amount of mischief, gave it the old name back. So the band Osanna came out of is also the band Osanna turned into.

The short version

El Tor is the only album by the second Città Frontale, released in 1975 on Fonit Cetra. Eight tracks, evenly split across two sides. Vairetti sings and plays electric, acoustic and twelve-string guitar, Mellotron, harmonica and bells, and wrote the words and music; Guarino plays drums, percussion and vibraphone; Enzo Avitabile, then very young, plays sax and flute; Gianni Guarracino, formerly of Saint Just, plays guitar and synth; Rino Zurzolo plays bass; Paolo Raffone plays piano, Fender Rhodes, harpsichord, organ, Mellotron and glockenspiel. Vairetti and Guarino produced it themselves. Guarino designed the sleeve; there is a clenched fist on the back.

El Tor

El Tor is the name of the cholera strain that reached Naples in 1973, and the album is a concept built on it — not as reportage but as metaphor, and a thoroughly pessimistic one. The protagonist sets out to redeem a sick society and is instead absorbed by it, becoming a scourge himself: the man who was supposed to be the cure turns into the thing he was curing. That is the whole argument, and it is a bleaker idea than anything Osanna attempted. The record was later staged in a theatre. Whether it is genuinely a militant album is disputed, and the dispute is worth keeping: some hear something more committed and more explicit than Osanna ever were, alternating metaphor with directness; others argue the band went only as far as the iconography of militancy and no further.

The sound

Jazz rock, progressive writing and wide acoustic spaces alternating across eight tracks, and it plainly recalls the atmospheres of the band it came from. The Osanna elements that survive are the ones that mattered: heavy use of sax and flute, and the mix of progressive structures with Mediterranean folk. What is different is the approach, which is more melodic and, depending on who you ask, more commercial. There is a great deal of keyboard colour here that Osanna never had — Raffone brought harpsichord, Rhodes, glockenspiel and a second Mellotron to sit under Vairetti’s — and the result is warmer and more furnished. It is also, and there is no way around this, lighter.

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The songs

The album opens with the long Alba di una città running into Solo uniti, which is the most ambitious stretch here and the closest to the old band. The title track follows. Duro lavoro is the direct one. Mutazione is the instrumental, and the title does the concept’s work in a single word. La casa del mercante Sun is the gem — ask Italians who love this record and it is the track they name, every time. Milioni di persone and Equilibrio divino close it. Eight pieces, no suites, nothing over-extended: after Palepoli this band had decided that the statement would be made by the writing rather than by the running time.

Reception and legacy

The critical charge has always been the same one, and it stuck: most reviewers saw a clear derivation from the Osanna sound, and some went further and called the album inescapably derivative. Against that, the defence from Italian listeners is worth hearing: nobody claims this has the weight or the bite of Palepoli, or its historical reach, but calling it lightweight is going too far — think of it as a more acoustic Osanna and the record makes sense on its own terms. The experience was short. Avitabile went on to a substantial career of his own. Guarino had already painted the cover of Osanna’s fourth album, which is a neat detail: the same hand on both sides of the split.

The verdict

For people who have done Osanna and want to know what happened next. La casa del mercante Sun first, because it is the best thing here and it is not close. Then Alba di una città and Solo uniti together, which is where the ambition lives. Then Duro lavoro. Then Mutazione. This is a step below Palepoli and everyone involved knew it, but it is a good album carrying an idea most bands would not have dared to write down — that the person trying to save you might be the disaster.

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