Review: BAR ITALIA – “Some Like It Hot”

There's always a good reason to spend time at Bar Italia — or at least there could be one.

The cult London trio (with singer Nina Cristante, very Italian), half art-pop, half disenchantment, returns with Some Like It Hot, a record that moves like a Billy Wilder film shot on magnetic tape: elegant, ironic, chaotic and vaguely melancholic.

From their DIY origins to the lights of global festivals, Bar Italia have built a mythology made of subtractions: little exposure, many downcast glances and a certain idea of ​​”cool” understood as emotional distance. This new work, the fifth in five years, however, marks the end of innocence: it is their most exposed, smoothest and most conscious work. The sound, once fragile and sketchy, becomes full, three-dimensional — but also less mysterious.

Fundraiser and Marble Arch they oscillate between Britpop languor (they remind me of Hard-Fi, The Rapture and that scene there…) and a sense of intellectual apathy. Bad Reputation tries the chamber waltz, while Cowbella plays with groove and irony but stumbles upon lyrics that are too sketchy to be truly incisive. Yet, here and there, flashes of grace can be glimpsed: vocal lines that chase each other, nylon guitars that touch the bossa in Plastered, a retro echo of Saint Etienne that restores a minimum of human warmth and blurs the edges of so much glacial aestheticism.

The point is precisely this: Some Like It Hot is a record that no one wants to like, and perhaps that's why it works — at least at times. It is an exercise in style on disillusionment, the sonic chronicle of a band living in the post-reality of the London scene, where every gesture is a pose and every pose is a content. It's a shame that, behind the veneer, there is little left to remember: once the spotlights are turned off, what remains is the impression of a project that knows very well how to appear, but not always how to excite.

An album that you listen to like you watch a fashion show: enchanted, but with the suspicion that form matters more than substance. Yet, in the end, going to Bar Italia is still a good choice.

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