Bar Italia – ‘Tracey Denim’ album review
London-based Bar Italia, made up of Rome-born Nina Cristante (of dreamy solo project NINA), Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton (also of the grungy shoegaze project Double Virgo), have so far retained relative obscurity despite their growing popularity in underground artsy scenes. Photos of the band on social media accounts are often blurry or distorted, tour posters are devoid of any specific aesthetic choice, and interviews with band members are like gold dust.
This esoteric identity seems only to have served their success in this scene – word of mouth has led to sold out shows at cult venues across the country, releases on Dean Blunt’s label, and festival slots at End Of The Road and Pitchfork Music Festival.
Now, they provide us with one more puzzle piece with the release of Tracey Denim, their third full length album and their first on Matador Records. Mixed by the Grammy-nominated Marta Salogni (Björk, Black Midi, Porridge Radio), the LP blends together a number of influences, from post-punk to slowcore to britpop. It has all the assured coolness of modern peers like Sorry, but it’s much softer, borrowing from 90s dreampop and triphop to create a real collage of sound. Aesthetically, the album is still as confusing as the rest of Bar Italia’s output – half the tracks are stylised in lowercase, the cover features the band in high contrast black and white, and a lot of the track names make little sense on first glance.
However, there is a consistency to the album sonically. Throughout it relishes in its fuzziness, picked guitar melodies, and conversational interplay between vocals. The most recent single, ‘changer’ delivered an effortlessly cool dose of melancholic shoegaze indie, a sound that persists into the full length release.
Opening track ‘guard’ is reminiscent of Broadcast, optimistic piano chords form the instrumental while Cristante’s accented vocals float freely above them, repeating “in the mind of another” like a lost train of thought. The second single ‘Nurse!’ follows this theme, layering fuzzy guitar with increasingly desperate vocals lamenting, “I can’t leave it alone and get you out of my head.”
Tracks like ‘F.O.B’, a post-punk style song with carelessly spoken lyrics, and ‘punkt’, the first single from the LP, seem to form a conversation between the vocalists lamenting the breakdown of a relationship. On the latter, Tarik begs “Always missed you, fuck, not having fun… Can I come inside?” while Nina responds, “Wanna say just leave me alone / And I don’t owe you an explanation.”
Other highlights of the release include ‘my kiss era’, which combines trip-hop style drums and atmosphere with seductive vocals and 90s guitar, and ‘Missus Morality’, which considers loneliness, identity and belonging over a plucky guitar melody and a dream-pop inspired chorus.
This struggle with mind and identity persists into the final few tracks on the album – haunting, isolated vocals are accompanied only by minimal guitar in ‘Horsey Girl Rider‘ as the piercing vocals detail “searching without my hands”, while ‘NOCD’ pushes intrusive thoughts onto the listener: “You’re sorry to be manic and everyone is leaving you.”
The closing track ‘maddington’ is perhaps their largest divergence from the fuzzy sound of most of the album. It’s immediately softer, happier, with a guitar strum reminiscent of The Sundays and ascending synths. More hopeful, the lyrics state: ”I’ll figure it out if you stay.”
Tracey Denim supplies a breath of fresh air in underground indie. It’s cool but still accessible, taking influence from a myriad of genres while remaining undoubtedly sure of itself. Combining the revived interest in overlooked genres like shoegaze, dream-pop and trip-hop with their unique layered vocals and intriguingly enigmatic presence, it seems Bar Italia have hit the sweet spot in guaranteeing the approval of current indie kids. Tracey Denim is an instant underground classic.
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