I always have a hard time explaining what attracts me to bar italia, the trio of Londoners Nina Cristante, Sam Fenton, and Jezmi Fehmi. After all, they can’t really sing and at times sound like they don’t care much about making music. At first, it sounds like they are adding nothing new to their tried-and-true template of ’90s slacker rock pastiche. But then they’ll land on a perfect riff, or they’ll weave their vocals together in a freakily fresh way, like triplets who share a single angsty mind. It’s a blurry morass of lovesick languor conveyed through aching croaks and shy melodies.
I’ve been dipping into the new album by Double Virgo, the duo of Fenton and Fehmi, which they began before linking up with Cristante and launching bar italia just before the pandemic. Shakedown leaves the attic and lets the light run over their guitars, with streaks of brightness and a rhythmic tightness that ditches the glorious sloppiness of bar italia’s earlier music. I keep coming back for the little moments: the rollicking cascade of “Vis a Vis,” the call-and-response cheers on “bemused,” the way the two playfully stumble over each other on “Role Play.”
When bar italia ended their media embargo and did a flurry of interviews last year, many tried to crack the band—unravel their cult appeal, dissect their intentions. The result was some dissing of modern British bands (“I cannot honestly say I like anyone’s music. I don’t even like our music,” Fehmi told Crack), but mostly fluff: Yeah, we’re three friends and we’re making music. They defibrillated guitar music when people were pronouncing it dead; they did indie sleaze without the obvious and garish commercial lameness. They curated mystique, they gave loner malaise the faded glamour of a black-and-white film.
I’ve been digging a bunch of bands who rose in the wake of or alongside bar italia, who deploy guitars in weird ways and whose core inspirations fuse some combo of the Cure, Dean Blunt, and a ’90s dartboard of clangor and jangle (Blur, Pavement, trip-hop, shoegaze). The styles seem to appeal to people like me, whose primary lane isn’t guitar-centric music but for whom the alt-rock triggers something nostalgic and poignant (the image of myself at the age of 2 joyously zooming around my family’s home to the Libertines). There’s a textural hookiness that feels indebted to weird dance music. It’s less “jamming out in your dad’s muggy garage,” more art school kids with good taste, and without being didactic or overly conceptual.