Bar Italia spent their first few years in quasi-anonymity, tinged with the default intrigue that attaches to sure bands who decline to overshare. They bathed within the transitive mystique of affiliation with Dean Blunt, who launched their first few recordings on his World Music label, they usually trafficked in a diffuse combination of sounds cribbed from Eighties and ’90s UK indie: tendrils of flanged electrical guitar, mopey boy/woman vocals, the occasional squall of stompbox fuzz. Pairing sullen dissonance with stone-faced reticence, their music was heavy on vibe and troublesome to pin down, its consistency as imprecise as their intentions.
Early songs not often broke the two-minute mark, however they have been the other of pithy. Bitter as curdled milk, they resembled demos rescued from a thrifted four-track recorder, virtually archaeological of their layers of magnetic hiss and half-obscured hints of slowcore and shoegaze. One observe specifically—“Killer Intuition,” the penultimate lower on their second album, 2021’s Bedhead—served as a type of Rosetta Stone: Roughly midway via its 99-second run, a warbly voice breaks right into a ramshackle cowl of the Treatment’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” the timekeeping as haphazard because the tune-carrying. For all of the galaxy-brain hypothesis, the unguarded qualities of “Killer Intuition,” in addition to the obviousness of the reference, prompt that the band’s motives weren’t all that sophisticated. Because it did for generations of indie rockers earlier than them, the obvious amateurism testified to the depth of their feeling.
With Tracey Denim, Bar Italia’s first album for Matador, much more of the thriller dissipates, and never simply because the group is now identified to be the trio of Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton, of the duo Double Virgo, and Nina Cristante, a longtime Dean Blunt affiliate who moonlights as an “intuitive coach” and nutritionist. The sound of the self-produced report suggests a fog burning off. The chords are crisper, the rhythms sprightlier, and the hooks stickier, although the temper stays hushed and the textures moth-eaten. Greater than ever, they put on their influences—the Treatment, Slowdive, Pavement—on their tattered sleeves. “Clark” is a showcase for the guitar-bass interaction of New Order’s Low-Life; the luxurious acoustic guitars and sighing vocals of “changer” are prime Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me or Want-era Treatment.
On earlier Bar Italia data, the contours of their music have been obscured by lo-fi murk, however on Tracey Denim the guitars assume the foreground, chiming post-punk riffs offset by sturdy basslines. Their use of dissonance feels extra strategic right here, with clanging chords throwing off a faint metallic glow that helps silhouette the skeletal melodic strains. The grooves are groovier, too, imbued with the shuffling syncopations of the Stone Roses and My Bloody Valentine, teams that smuggled dance rhythms into late-’80s indie underneath cowl of a guitar-heavy wall of sound.
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