Alex Baroni - Ultimamente (1999)

Italian pop vocalist Alex Baroni teams up with a number of electronica musicians for Ultimamente, resulting in a sort of cutting-edge electro-pop album. It's a strange compromise, actually. Baroni is a talented vocalist, much like what you'd expect given his Italian roots. And the album's primary songwriters -- Massimo Calabrese, Marco Rinalduzzi, Marco D'Angelo, Carlo Bertotti, and Claudio Mattone -- craft ethereal electronic soundscapes that are anything but "classical" in the same sense that Baroni's singing style is. However, there is a strange synthesis of Baroni's traditional vocal approach and this album's somewhat trendy musical production. Baroni himself goes for a trendy image, illustrated well in the CD booklet where the vocalist is pictured in numerous introspective poses with a shaved head and no shirt. On the other hand, Baroni's traditional Italian vocal approach makes the album's music sound a bit more accessible. The resulting synthesis is both familiar in one sense yet cutting-edge in another.