Released on October 9th with Cello Label, the ClaT album is introduced by the single “Strada,” and features a string of songs showing the artist’s matrix, eight of which were produced and recorded by Giordano Colombo at Auditoria Records , while two other pieces were recorded as a double version in Italian and English by Fabrizio Saullo at the Saul Studio in Milan.
Claudio Tagliabue is an Italian singer and guitar player, frontman of the rock band Dusk since 1998. In 2017 he also joined the punk rock band Like Looking for Gold as a bass player. Both groups are from lake Como, Italy.
In early 2007, during a pause of Dusk, ClaT did start to play in a band called Clearly Quite Absurd. Although each member had already been committed to different bands, with different experiences and musical tastes, how much they enjoyed playing together.
Therefore the band began to hold concerts in the area of Como, playing rock covers from the ’60s and from more recent years, and performing both in electric and entirely acoustic.
In 2008 CQA won a music competition held on the shores of Lake Como, offering original songs composed by Claudio for his former band Dusk. Then in 2010, with the help of professional drummer and producer Giordano Colombo, they published a demo CD, including “Speechless,” “Velocity,” and “28”, songs which received positive reviews and support even outside Italy.
After performing in a 2 hours show in the rock city of Tampere, Finland, and some more concerts in north Italy in the following years, the band’s components started different projects. So Claudio decided to finish the songs he was working on and started his solo project under the moniker of ClaT.
“Directions” is an album that collects songs written by ClaT between 2008 and 2010. The inactivity of Dusk, his main group, and the perfect alchemy created with the brothers Daniele and Luca Mazzoni have allowed Tagliabue to continue effortlessly to arrange and write.
Continuing to explore his creative world, Claudio has extended and then enclosed it in this release that has found its missing piece in Giordano Colombo, producer and drummer at the Auditoria Records recording studio.
The album has a genuine pop-rock matrix. However, the work done by ClaT does not fail to probe and gradually expand into folds closer to electronics.
The root therefore remains clearly distinguishable, properly rock in the belly. Delivery is expansive, familiar, and close at hand, just how pop intended. The intuition and the spark come through electronic cues, which take manufacturing to the next level.
The founding work of a new act, “Directions,” is the needle of a compass that the artist turns at his command, pointing towards those cardinal points that provide him with light.
The clarity of ideas and intentions that run throughout the album gives an exquisite overview of the horizons that ClaT is persecuting. It is thus that the directions of the past mark those to be followed in the new way.
Through the personal, musical, and artistic history of what came before, the album finds its most advanced pinnacle of this new vision in the track “New Direction.”
And it is certainly no coincidence that the track that follows “New Direction” is “Strada” – which means road – as to reiterate that what we are today and what we will be tomorrow is a consequence and fruit of what we were tomorrow.
An intuition that is itself the added value of the message offered by ClaT. Where many artists throw themselves headlong into “commercial” productions, which are extinguished at the end of the track itself, Tagliabue focuses on the history of a man, an artist, on the threshold of a new flight.
The result is something enthusiastic, solid, and dense. Definitely something destined to remain, functioning as a monolithic foundation plate on which to build and develop a new artistic path. 
Listen now to "Directions," the debut Album by ClaT, available in streaming on all major digital platforms. You can find your favorite one via https://orcd.co/clat_directions
To know more about ClaT and his music, find and follow ClaT all over the web by checking the links below:
<\span>During the lockdown of spring 2020, ClaT published the Ep “March ’20.” A collecting home recordings, “March ’20” is the sequel to “Directions,” representing the last stage of that evolutionary process just started by ClaT. Check it out at the following link: clatcomo.bandcamp.com
Video of the Italian version of the single “Strada.” Together with “New Direction” the two tracks represent the manifesto of ClaT’s debut album.
- .: Nova MUSIC blog // November 2020