Klimt 1918

Opened by the brutal melody of “Dream Core”, making its live debut after being released last March, the concert by Rome's Klimt 1918 fills the Monk Club on a mild mid-September Saturday night. Among the standard-bearers of Italian nu-shoegaze, the band led by the Soellner brothers returns home to present their new work “Àmor”, released on Prophecy Productions. A silence that had lasted ten years, since the excellent “Sentimentale Jugend”, which in turn came out after almost another decade of absence. With the anthem “Skygazer” we go back as far as 2008, when the Rome-based band managed – on their third record for the label – to show all their artistic maturity.
Spurred on by the crowd's warmth, Klimt 1918 venture into the most ethereal dream-pop territory on the new “Aventine”, before hitting hard with sounds caught between metal and eighties-style wave on the hypnotic “Just An Interlude In Your Life”.

The Monk's hall is thus wrapped in dazzling sound, literally overrun by the intense sonic light of "Comandante". "Ghost Of A Tape Listener" brings a post-rock ballad that hurls emotional grenades, while "Pale Song" turns back the clock over twenty years, with guitars à-la Cure.
Despite a somewhat muddy sound, "Belvedere" recovers pure wave scenery, while Soellner comments on this past summer by invoking "Snow Of '85", which brings to mind certain arrangements by Explosions In The Sky. The show continues briskly and pleasantly through two more tracks from the new album, between the skygaze version of "Nihil Vltra" and the dissonant "Eros", which unfolds into a frightening central section of pure distortion and melody.

The band bids farewell to the crowd and returns shortly after for the encore, amid general applause. "It Was To Be" starts off quietly before exploding in a noise-drenched coda, while "Sant'Angelo (The Sound The Fury)" is a vibrant progression straddling the early wave of bands like U2 and shoegaze reverb. Or rather, skygaze, a term coined to best capture the sound of one of the most solid bands on the Italian scene.

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