Bar Italia are everything all at once on their second album of the year.
Jumping to conclusions often makes for some kind of payback later.
In the case of Bar Italia, if you were to go solely by the name you might imagine the sound of indie jazz; inoffensive and as bland as the overpriced food and wine. But if that’s the case, you’d be very wrong.
A trio comprising Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, Sam Fenton and Nina Cristante, the group’s early output was obscured by a veil of secrecy before eventually they signed to the Matador label and released their third album Tracey Denim in the spring of this year.
Traversing the very narrow path between cult status and escaping the toilet circuit is a balancing act of which it’s impossible not to piss someone off, but as if daring fans of their early material to ostracise them, along comes The Twits less than six months later.
This second installment was recorded in a temporary studio in Mallorca but, as on previous outings, there’s very little sunshine across the thirteen tracks here – although the brevity (or economy if you prefer) of their past material is far less of a thing, the bony Sonic Youth influenced twist not so much stretching their old envelope as tearing it to bits.
By now it should be clear that this isn’t stuff you can sip a watery lager and scoff some tasteless olives along to: opener ‘my little tony’, with its saw tooth riffs and lairy what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it snap, could be Elastica with a hangover, but ‘Hi fiver’ is wrung out, doll like post-punk that feels like it’s going to collapse in on itself at any given moment, whilst ‘sounds like you had to be there’ pivots between insistent, whispered nothings and atonal shambling.
Now free from the tiresome constraints of anonymity, even if it reduces cool by a factor of X, the band are happily on the record as deliberately attempting to conjure up something new from the milieu of rock music, a task which it’s fair to say could be regarded as too much for one party.
Fehmi has been recently quoted in interview wisely observing: ‘If you pick up a guitar you’re engaging in the past, inherently,’ applying some much-needed context to their retro Frankenstein of parts, a substance culled from old episodes of MTV’s 120 Minutes.
It’s an ugly sounding formula in abstract, but when you’re after some lofty goals but simultaneously wanting to convey the impression that you don’t give a fuck about them it’s pretty much the ideal way to approach things.
There’s plenty of conformity in results too, another rejection of the du jour flitting between tricks and styles; ‘Brush w Faith’ mooches about, feathered by weird minor keys and an insistent mono-riff, Jelsy is a lo-fi shuffle on which the vocal interplay sounds like it’s being conducted by half asleep people on either side of a door, whilst closer bibs is a cocktail of feedback and slacker self examination.
It’s all hard to you know…get, but that’s completely the point and the only way in which it could work without seeming ridiculous – you don’t get to be pop stars like this. And you’ll still come back to the likes of shoo and ‘world’s greatest emoter’ and realise during the latter that this is what Kevin Shields was trying to do on Loveless without all the dicking about on pedals.
Bar Italia you reckon want you to jump to conclusions. If you’re new here The Twits will sound dazzling, frustrating, terrible and genius, sometimes all at once.
If you’re not, it’s nothing and everything you’d expect, but if you’re not new here, you’d guessed that already.