Klimt 1918 - Technical Rehearsals for Italian Shoegazing

Brothers Marco (voice/guitar) and Paolo (drums) Soellner live in Rome; after their first musical experiences as teenagers, they founded Another Day, drawing inspiration from avant-garde English doom, particularly early Anathema, and from Swedish death metal. They recorded two demos and an Ep, after which the band split up. It's the tail end of the Nineties, the age of grunge, noise and post-rock, the golden age of Italian alternative. Alongside all these inevitable influences, Marco rediscovers his love for the darkwave of Cure, Joy Division and Bauhaus. With Davide Pesola on bass and Francesco Tumbarello on guitar, they carry on their personal artistic journey by founding the original core of Klimt 1918. The goal is to move away from the harsh sounds they'd played until then, shifting toward a more imaginative and accessible song form, tied to those nu-nu-wave influences that are taking hold on both sides of the Atlantic.

The band's name is a tribute to Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, and 1918 represents - besides the end of World War I - the year of his death. The first compositions written in rehearsal by the newly formed quartet were captured on the now-impossible-to-find self-produced demo Secession Makes Post-Modern Music: five tracks recorded by their friend Giuseppe Orlando, known as the drummer of Novembre, among which the powerful "Schmerzwerk 1976" and the more reflective "Passive" stand out. The love for Northern European goth-metal comes through clearly, filtered through a new openness to wave and alt-rock influences, all wrapped in a blanket of electricity never lacking in decisive melodic touches. It's still a strongly derivative work, but one already capable of pointing the way the band intends to pursue. The demo helps the guys land a few gigs and plays a significant role in spreading their name. Everything works out so well that the independent label My Kingdom Music signs the four of them, with an agreement to record two albums. It's done!

To finish the new songs and finally hold the first real Klimt 1918 album in their hands, fans had to wait until 2003. In the meantime, Alessandro Pace replaced Tumbarello on lead guitar, bringing with him crucial input that helped define the band's new stylistic coordinates, with the result that Undressed Momento sounds far softer and far less metal than anything they'd done before. Just listening to the title track is enough to grasp the band's clear evolution, now capable of writing songs with a strongly melodic, emotional bent. "That Girl" has Cure-like guitars crossing paths with math-rock refractions, even more evident on the closing "Stalingrad Theme"; "Pale Song" and "Naif Watercolour" head straight for indie territory, while "Parade Of Adolescence" contains all the seeds of the perfect pop song.

There are plenty of influences at play on a stylistically varied album, eight tracks showing a band determined to toss aside all its certainties and push forward. Their identity isn't fully defined yet, but Klimt 1918 are searching for the direction that will best showcase their undeniable talent. They're still very much a work in progress, which is hardly surprising, but in the meantime the band gets noticed by the German cult label Prophecy Productions, with whom they sign a new deal in 2004, and who will reissue Undressed Momento two years later. The encounter with Prophecy's management proves to be the real turning point in the band's history. And as the band starts to build a following beyond Italy's borders, the time comes to get properly serious.

By 2005 the second chapter of the Klimt 1918 story is ready: Dopoguerra. From the outset you can hear a more polished production, the fruit of new resources at the band's disposal. The blood-red sky captured on the cover evokes Under A Blood Red Sky by U2, a reference that's clearly no accident, since the tone of many tracks recalls the Irish band directly, starting with "They Were Wed By The Sea". The wave component is well represented by the Interpol-style constructions found in "Rachel", dedicated to a young North American activist killed along the Gaza Strip during a peace mission. In the background, traces of Scandinavian metal remain ("Lomo") alongside Explosions In The Sky-school post-rock (the build of the brilliant "Snow Of 85"), but the epiphany of the whole record is found in the closing track, "Sleepwalk In Rome", where Italian-language vocals split the song in half, neatly summing up the entire album.

This is cinematic music that leaves room for the imagination, inspired (according to Soellner) by the neorealism of Rossellini and De Sica. A cascade of images, memories and sensations: like leafing through a photo album. It tells the story of the postwar period, of the wounds left by the conflict, yet it's a record of hope, opening with the famous radio announcement of Italy's liberation from the fascist regime. Still somewhat derivative, with Dopoguerra Klimt 1918 nonetheless make an album that begins to more clearly define the Roman outfit's place on the national scene, standing out for its originality and evocative power. An extended version of the record would also be released, containing some outtakes and alternate versions of the songs. Their first European tour would follow.

In September 2006 Alessandro Pace steps away, replaced by Francesco Conte. The new line-up makes Just In Case We'll Never Meet Again, subtitled "Soundtrack For The Cassette Generation". Released in June 2008, it represents the definitive convergence of the band's various influences: a limbo holding together early U2, the romantic abandon of shoegaze, the metal hybridizations of Dredg, Katatonia, Deftones and our own Novembre. The furthest point reached by an aesthetic of contamination, geared toward ever-greater cohesion and accessibility. A work polished with near-obsessive care, also thanks to the help of Swedish producer Jens Bogren, marking a further significant step in the band's maturation. Inside you'll find a rich, muffled sound, in which the aggression of their early days is completely softened into an increasingly dreamlike imprint, already well showcased on the opening "The Breathtaking Days".

In the fertile ground of melancholy and memory, Marco Soellner and his bandmates draw the lifeblood of their songs: snapshots of faces, places, moments lost to time, wrapped in a faint, faded light, yet strong enough to endure as a safe haven offering warmth and comfort. Melancholy songs, nostalgic, pained, decadent, yet always positive, often centred on the fleeting nature of life and love, dense with spleen yet also with happiness and hope, in which the dramatic element never feels forced.

A work of great poetic breadth, a river in flood that nearly overwhelms, without pause, in its unbridled and inspired surge of heightened emotional intensity. Every track brims with the conflicting feelings of a farewell or a return to one's roots, and over it all looms an aching sense of unbridgeable distance. In its most touching and grandiose moments Klimt 1918 find their most congenial register, delivering unforgettable gems: "Ghost Of A Tape Listener" is an explosion of lights and colours in the form of a restless (post-)rock ballad, "Just An Interlude In Your Life" is powerful in its stride, the spectacular anthem "Skygazer" towers above everything, "The Graduate" leaves us defenceless with its sweet, forlorn pace, sublimated into a nostalgic, sweeping instrumental coda. The band dons new wave clothing on the lively title track and on the dark "Atget", episodes that naturally stake out a possible middle ground between Interpol (also echoed in "Suspense Music") and Deftones. "All Summer Long" ventures into more abstract shoegaze experimentation, a direction the band seems increasingly drawn to. And it is precisely this path that will, a few years later, most clearly define the adult phase of the Lazio outfit.

With Just In Case We'll Never Meet Again, Klimt 1918 definitively establish themselves on the national scene, becoming a key reference point in Italy's new indie-rock scene. In April 2009 the band releases its first music video, made to accompany "Ghost Of A Tape Listener", and subsequently puts out an EP containing the unreleased "Blackeberg 1981". Then the band unexpectedly disappears from the scene for several years. Forced to deal with the demands of adult life, Marco Soellner and his bandmates meanwhile keep writing and — in whatever spare time they can find — rehearsing, with the goal of eventually making their long-awaited fourth album.

By the end, they'd written and recorded so much material that an opportunity arose with their German label Prophecy to release two records. That's how "Sentimentale" and "Jugend" came to be, the former slightly more "atmospheric" ("Montecristo"), the latter a touch more intense ("Sant'Angelo"), yet cohesive enough to warrant a simultaneous release. Sentimentale Jugend, released on December 2, 2016, is a bold project, both for its sheer scale (we're talking 19 tracks across 108 minutes total, plus a bonus track on the limited double-CD edition with a 48-page booklet) and for its unusually convincing switching between Italian and English, as well as for its precise stylistic reference point: a melancholy shoegaze framework brimming with melodic ideas, able for the first time to sharply define the personality of the four musicians involved. Ethereal, dream-pop-derived vocals, effects-laden guitars forever on the brink of exploding, brushstrokes of synth poured into the amplifiers, raising a wall of sound as impenetrable as the fog pictured on the cover. The reference points here lie less with the classic Ride, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, and more with the recent path taken by American band Nothing, or with the early work of our own Giardini di Mirò.

Sentimentale Jugend stands out for its intensity and epic sweep, banishing almost entirely any lingering goth-metal, alt-rock and indie-pop influence, keeping just a faint wave undertow here and there ("Belvedere") and establishing, from the very first tracks ("Comandante" and "La notte" brush against perfection), an emotional weight so heavy it becomes almost unbearable at times. The album's length doesn't undercut the brilliance of the final result, though keeping focus throughout a monolith of this scale is a genuinely tough ask, with certain devices and dynamics inevitably recurring. One nagging doubt remains: would a leaner record (trimming a few more "ambient" passages and dropping the one cover on offer, the forgettable "Take My Breath Away" by Berlin) have been more effective, and perhaps more digestible for a wider audience? But evidently the band's goal is to make no compromises, and knowing full well they're holding the record of their lives, they refuse to give it to us in anything less than its entirety. Sentimentale Jugend is such a beautiful, fascinating tome precisely because it is so deliberately imperfect; it has the strength to mark the highest point of Klimt 1918's career, an encyclopedic work destined to place them among the finest names on the European shoegaze scene.

Just when that monolith seemed to have exhausted every possible direction, Klimt 1918 chose not to replicate it. Ten years on, Àmor arrives as its necessary counterweight: not an encyclopedia, but an intimate notebook; not an impenetrable wall of sound, but a dimly lit room where every song becomes fragile yet dense sonic matter. If Sentimentale Jugend was a fresco that aspired to contain the whole world, Àmor folds inward, digging through the rubble to pull out eleven songs that don't try to fill the void of the ten years between the two records, but instead try to inhabit it. The title is a mirror game: read backwards it reveals Roma, the city the band has never stopped living in. Not the postcard Rome, but a Pasolini-esque Rome of decay, of sweltering August outskirts and ruins people have long since stopped noticing. A mental and sonic landscape before it is ever a geographical one.

The stylistic coordinates remain the same as ever — shoegaze, post-rock, dream pop — but they're reassembled in a more essential, bolder form. Their label has coined the term "skygaze", which is indeed a gaze turned toward the sky, a vertical melancholy that seeks no redemption but soars toward it without fighting gravity. Àmor breaks from its predecessor through greater freedom in the arrangements. There's no excess here; this time the songwriting strips itself down, proving that maturity doesn't lie in accumulation but in the ability to say less in order to make room for intimacy.

And if Klimt 1918's career has so far been a long journey through the various currents of European rock, Àmor may well represent their most personal, intimate and mature chapter yet.

The right record at the right time, one that doesn't aim to be the record of a lifetime, but rather the one that arrives once life, with all its silences and waiting, has already said everything.

Contributions by Mauro Roma (“Just In Case We'll Never Meet Again”) and Ljós Berinn (Àmor)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google