Gazebo Penguins

Getting lost in your own thoughts, for a little while, for a long while, or for a moment that feels like an eternity, gazing off into the coloured lights illuminating the walls of the Covo Club, is one of those pre-show rituals at the tail end of an all-too-busy, chaotic week. No opening act warmed up the atmosphere while waiting for the Gazebo Penguins, leaving the room at the mercy of stretched-out time, filled instead with the chatter and laughter of the crowd.

The band, straddling emo-core and post-hc, made up of the historic trio Gabriele Malavasi, Andrea Sologni and Pietro Cottafavi, and rounded out by Riccardo Rossi, marked their return to the Casalone stage by running through the strongest cuts of their catalogue, from their latest work "Quanto", released last December, all the way to the tracks from "Raudo", which turned ten this past April.

The one to shatter the calm outright could only be the wall of sound of the desperate "Nubifragio", which looks back and loses itself in fragments of memory, before settling into the drum-driven steps of "Nebbia", wrapped in synths and guitars, and raising the stakes again with the jolts of the whirling "Il tram delle 6". The drum rolls of "Nevica" slide into the gentler rhythm section of "Erwin", ahead of the tenth-anniversary celebrations for "Raudo" kicked off by "Trasloco".

A triptych of cuts from "Nebbia" follows, with the heavy footsteps and stasis described in "Bismantova", a theme echoed in the electronic phrasing of "Pioggia", and in the muffled, synthetic crescendo of "Febbre". The pit gets moving again on "Casa dei miei", with the pounding "Difetto" and the full-throated singing over the notes of "Finito il caffè", before braking sharply into the measured drum steps of the reflective "Uscire", the closing track of "Quanto".

The final rush, punctuated by banter with the crowd (and a shower straight onto my own head, courtesy of Malavasi's bottle), sees the effective "Cpr14" come through, almost inevitably breaking out of that earlier stillness, followed by the sing-alongs on "Soffrire non è utile" and the nostalgic "Correggio", reaching its peak with the more celebrated "Senza di te".

A journey hand in hand with old friends, over the course of which life flashes before us in half a second of melancholy. That's the feeling a Gazebo Penguins show leaves behind, amid fragments of stories about shattered dreams and others that come true only through real effort, much like the band's own story, suspended on the thread of a hidden hope and the ever-present question of what tomorrow will bring.

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