Disco Drive

An unrestrained night of live music at the Magnolia, the Arci club that sits in the middle of Milan's Idroscalo park, warming up ahead of a spring line-up that's shaping up to be seriously impressive. On June 9th and 10th, in fact, names of the calibre of Yuppie Flu, Bugo, Amari, Moltheni, Diaframma, Baustelle, Giardini Di Mirò, The Death Of Anna Karina, Ardecore, Cesare Basile and many others will parade through here, for a festival of Independent Music (the MI AMI) set to breathe some fresh air into Milan's usually stifling alternative scene. The dress rehearsal for what's to come falls to Disco Drive, an adrenaline-fuelled trio based in Turin who have long carved out a well-deserved place for themselves on the Italian underground circuit and beyond.

Disco Drive arrive at the Milan show with a brand-new line-up, with bassist Matteo Lavagna taking the spot once held by Andrea Pomini, and guitarist Alessio Natalizia setting aside percussion to add a second drum kit alongside Jacopo Borazzo's. The sound on offer is undoubtedly international in scope, starting with the choice of English lyrics, and continuing with the swagger of an American band that gathers up many of those punk-funk seeds sown twenty-five years ago by Britain's Gang Of Four, and picked up today, across the ocean, by the likes of early Liars, Rapture and !!!. The result, thoroughly convincing, is underpinned by a beefy rhythm section that occasionally boasts double drums backing powerful, angular basslines, by Clash-style vocal interplay involving the whole trio and, not least, by guitar work as essential as it is effective.

In short, that there's more than enough here to throw a proper booze-fuelled party is clear from the drumming barrages unleashed on "The Leaving Feet", from the rough dance-inflected improvisation of the trio of unreleased tracks aired in the middle of the set ("It's A Long Way To The Top", "What Are You Talkin' About?" and "Punk!"), and through the dress rehearsals that the imminent release of the new EP "Very" evidently calls for. From the latter came "Back And Forth" and "Factory Of Minds", rolled out almost at the tail end of the show, when the strings of a guitar by then brutalised and exhausted seemed to have irrevocably abandoned Alessio. Besides the already-mentioned "The Leaving Feet", there was no shortage of other tracks from last year's successful album "What's Wrong With You, People": the opener "Better Is The New More" and the show's closer, reserved for the ultra-catchy, Rapture-style single "All About This".

A final piece of advice for all the foreign-obsessed indie snobs who eye Italian musical output with suspicion: if Disco Drive happen to pass through your neck of the woods (and it's likely, given the length of their tour, which currently has them booked across the whole of Europe), set your prejudices aside and go check them out. You'll be jumping right along with everyone else at the front of the stage, and you won't regret it one bit.

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