OndaRock turns 25

OndaRock turns a quarter of a century old. In the meantime, everything has happened: the world has changed radically in every respect, including music journalism: many rival webzines have vanished, while others have been born. But we're still here: we're still standing, as we wrote for our 20th birthday, quoting the good old Elton John. Certainly not to rest on our laurels and celebrate ourselves, though. Our goal remains the same: to keep questioning ourselves, look ahead and reinvent ourselves, searching out the most interesting new music, ideally with new tools and features, to better serve the interests of our readers.
We won't bore you with a rundown of these 25 years: those who follow us already know us, warts and all. And those discovering us only now will have plenty of time to get to know us better. Right now, we simply want to throw ourselves a party and celebrate this significant anniversary together with you, with a small OndaRock "Best of" spanning this quarter of a century. That is, by digging up some articles that, for each of us, were important or that we're most fond of. Enjoy the read, and keep following us for (at least) another 25 years! (Claudio Fabretti)

Contents

1. Claudio Fabretti – Television in Ciampino (Rome), 29/03/2016 (Live Report)
2. Giuliano Delli Paoli – U2 – Achtung Baby (Milestone)
3. Fabio Guastalla – The Specials – Friday Night, Saturday Morning (Juke-box)
4. Francesco Nunziata – Popol Vuh – Hosianna Mantra (Visions on 33rpm)
5. Federico Romagnoli – K-indie and Modern Rock, 1993-2025: A History of Korean Alternative Music (Miscellaneous: Rock History)
6. Alessandro Giustiniano – Basic Channel (Monograph)
7. Francesco Inglima – Khmer Pop – Cambodia's Shattered Dream (Miscellaneous: Rock History)
8. Daniel Moor – Jenny Hval – Classic Objects (Review)
9. Marco Sgrignoli – New Choral Music (Special)
10. Fabio Ferrara – Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream (33 rpm Visions)
11. Gianfranco Marmoro – Blue Nile (Monograph)
12. Michele Bordi – Radiohead – Arena Sferisterio (Macerata), 08/20/2017 (Live Report)
13. Maria Teresa Soldani – Julee Cruise – Floating Into The Night (Pietra miliare)
14. Peppe Trotta – Claire Rousay – A Softer Focus (Review)
15. Antonio Silvestri – Nas – Illmatic (Milestone)
16. Claudio Lancia – Steve Shelley – Interview
17. Valerio D'Onofrio – Rock Becomes Myth – The Best Guitar Solos from the '60s to Today (Special)
18. Michele Corrado – Afghan Whigs – Gentlemen (Milestone)
19. Marco Bercella – Junior Boys – So This Is Goodbye (recensione)
20. Paolo Ciro – Subsonica – Subsonica (Milestone)
21. Gabriele Benzing – Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell (Review)
22. Martina Vetrugno – Mother Love Bone – Apple (Milestone)

Claudio Fabretti
Television in Ciampino (Rome), 29/03/2016 (Live Report)

One morning I find a familiar name among my messages: Federico Fiumani, leader of Diaframma, a legend for us hardcore wavers. I figure it's some heads-up about upcoming releases, but instead I discover it's an unexpected compliment about one of my reviews. "A phrasing that sounds like hearing Tom Verlaine on guitar." Probably the best compliment I've ever received. So I couldn't not choose this particular article. In memory of Thomas Miller, aka Tom Verlaine.

Tonight isn't just a concert, it's a psychological transfer, a journey through time. The Orion in Ciampino standing in for CBGB. The little club lost in the countryside of Lazio, like the legendary New York dive bar where it all began: punk, new wave, the long wave that would sweep away an entire generation. Close your eyes and you can almost smell in the air the none-too-reassuring stench of the legendary bathrooms that owner Hilly Kristal - recalling the historic pissing sessions alongside Joey Ramone - was determined to recreate at all costs in his new Las Vegas venue in 2008. Poor unlucky Hilly died before he could pull it off, and maybe the stench you notice near the Orion's toilet is real, but no matter. Tonight is a time for resurrections. Even though Easter passed a couple of days ago, and the show Television performing Marquee Moon has actually already been staged in Italy last year, at the Alcatraz in Milan and at the Roman Theatre in Fiesole (Florence). Not in Rome, though. In fact, this is the very first time ever for the American band in the capital, as Tom Verlaine himself will recall in one of his exceedingly rare remarks. But let's take things in order.
While in Italian homes people are still cursing at the TV over the epic defeat of the Azzurri in Germany, the Orion is already packed with a varied crowd, considerably less grizzled than expected, or at least more varied than a gathering of old-guard wavers from back in the day might suggest. When I arrive, Lùisa's opening set is wrapping up - the blonde Hamburg-born singer we've had the chance to interview on these pages and whose latest album, "Never Own" (2015), we appreciated. Too bad, Lùisa, maybe next time, but what little I caught left a good impression, as did the rather shy smile of the young singer-songwriter herself a little later, at her CD table.
Shortly before 11pm, the four protagonists take the stage in an almost stealthy fashion. Almost a ghost, good old Thomas Miller aka Tom Verlaine, pale and gaunt as expected, just a bit more grey-haired and marked in the face by his 66 years. He gestures for everyone to wait and launches into a nerve-wracking tuning session that severely tests the patience of the crowd, anxiously waiting to relive that historic full moon forty years on. "Marquee Moon" is more than an album, it's a waking dream, a gentle, acidic, disorienting revolution that redrew the boundaries of rock. It's one of those records that marked a before and an after. Even though - as often happens - almost nobody noticed at the time. It was "too jarring and anachronistic to succeed," Rolling Stone once declared.

Finally Tom gives his cohorts the green light – two of whom are longtime members of Television, namely Fred Smith (bass and backing vocals), formerly of Blondie, who stepped in in 1975 for Richard Hell, and Billy Ficca (drums) – while Jimmy Rip (guitar and backing vocals), a Verlaine collaborator since the early 80s, was brought in in 2007 after second guitarist Richard Lloyd left the band. All dressed in black and a bit laid-back: rock anti-stars, a little weathered by the years, but still tough and road-tested.
The sardonic chord progression and Latin-tinged changes of “Prove It” kick things off. Verlaine still sings in that aseptic, dreamlike tone, both detached and convulsive at once, with his unmistakable razor-sharp diction, even if his vocal cords aren't quite what they were in the 70s. He's bothered by the lights (which are, in fact, very low) and turns to the lighting tech: “Do something, they're blinding me.” So his gaunt silhouette grows ever more spectral in the darkness of the stage, while Rip backs him up on vocals and strings. The two engage in a fine plectrum-tipped duel on the following “Elevation,” whose disjointed sweetness spreads through the air, abruptly cut short by that bonsai-sized chorus – “Elevation… don't go to my head” – which sounds almost like the epitome of all the neuroses of the new wave era.
Verlaine, eyes almost always closed, stretches his swan-like neck toward the microphone, ever proud, with his aristocratic scowl, despite his youthful years spent as a dockworker. He is the man who legitimized guitar solos for the punk generation while simultaneously redefining their meaning: never a note too many, everything damn well functional to the songs' development. And onstage, the restraint of this atypical rocker, afflicted with a love of decadent poetry, seems almost at odds with the explosive charge of his anthems. Like the twisted blues-rock of “Friction,” with its incredible opening guitar rollercoaster, or a rousing “See No Evil,” sung along with the crowd on the refrain, where the mastery of metronomic drummer Ficca shines through once again: “He has Italian roots,” Verlaine notes admiringly, before launching into the eternal “Venus” (de Milo), which sends the audience into raptures: greying or entirely bald fifty-somethings shake it below the stage alongside twenty-something girls who seem to know every twist of those ungainly, mesmerizing guitar lines, driven by the bold thrust of Smith's bass, framing Verlaine's android vocals. Now that's what you call a classic.
Then it's ballad time. Like “Guiding Light,” a spell of grace and restlessness that pulls even a few vintage lighters out of pockets (is it the spirit of CBGB making people favor them over the usual phones?), or like the majestic descent into the depths of “Torn Curtain,” which brings down the curtain of night on the collective euphoria in a roll of drums and a fresh whirlwind of piercing guitars, with Verlaine as effective as ever at painting desolate atmospheres, teetering between rapture and agony.
The apotheosis is naturally the title track, transformed – predictably – into an exhausting, endless jam that showcases the full virtuosity of a band that was already playing post-punk before punk had even been invented, drawing on its deep grounding in jazz, blues and psychedelia. If “the sound of Tom Verlaine's guitar makes you think of the cry of a thousand birds,” as Patti Smith once put it, this wondrous lunar suite, at once so epic and so harrowing, with its lucid impressionistic delirium built from riffs, will forever remain its definitive testament.
Once the full performance of “Marquee Moon” is over, the band takes its bow, only to return to the stage for two encores: “Little Johnny Jewel,” the single released by the independent label Ork that preceded the album, and “I'm Gonna Find You,” a 1974 outtake dating back to the Richard Hell era.
See you soon, Verlaine bids farewell. Let's hope it won't take another forty years, dear Tom.
Now the lights come up and, no, that's not quite the CBGB stage. And yet, for almost an hour and a half, it felt like reliving the mystic initiation rite of the punk temple, where Television were regulars alongside the likes of Ramones, Talking Heads, New York Dolls, Patti Smith and Blondie. Rock miracles.

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Giuliano Delli Paoli
U2 – Achtung Baby (Milestone)

Holding the vinyl of “Achtung Baby” in your hands is like looking into a mirror inside a short film. Anton Corbijn's snapshots capture a new world, emerging between the slightly blurred black-and-white backdrop of a carnival night in Tenerife and the vivid brushstrokes on the bodywork of a Trabant weaving through the streets of a newborn Berlin. And then there are Moroccan traders, children on the beach, a cart of tomatoes. Bono plays the matador far from the arena, stripped of cape, muleta and sword, while Adam Clayton strips down himself. It's the photographic diary of a journey linking Santa Cruz, Berlin, Tenerife and Fes. Private excursions that U2 undertook at the dawn of the 90s to reunite fire and earth, the two key elements of a career that, up to that point, had been as untamed as a bull at Las Ventas or a Lamborghini Islero: take your pick.

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Fabio Guastalla
The Specials – Friday Night, Saturday Morning (Juke-box)

Late 1970s. Somewhere in the West Midlands something new is being born, destined to leave an indelible mark on the present and the future. On the outskirts of a country torn by unresolved conflicts, sliding into the Thatcher era without suspecting it would remain there for a long time, there's a music scene that makes inclusivity and a mixing of styles, influences and genres its distinguishing trait – in some ways a political one too, in its wish to inject, almost flaunt, a multiculturalism that mirrors the environment this music comes from. A challenge to racism and to a certain deep-rooted England, if you want to look at it that way. It all starts in one very specific place, Coventry, with a newly born label, Two-Tone Records, and (also) with the band in which the label's founder plays keyboards: his name is Jeremy David Hounsell Dammers, and his group had recently decided to call itself The Specials. The union of the city, the label, and the bands animating its scene, however seemingly small, however theoretically peripheral, gives rise to a new movement that injects into British rock agents that, until not long before, had been foreign to it – ska and its offshoots, reggae and rocksteady – in a formula that would later be dubbed second wave ska, or, more simply, 2 tone.

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Francesco Nunziata
Popol Vuh – Hosianna Mantra (Visions on 33 rpm)

The powerful message of “Hosianna Mantra,” and specifically of its title track, finds a sonic counterpart precisely in the dialogue between the acoustic instruments (voice, oboe, piano, tanpura) and the electric guitar, between the intrinsically organic, earthbound horizontality of the former and the celestial verticality of the latter. In the background lies the teaching of Martin Buber, especially of one of his most important works, “Ich und Du” (1923), in which emerges the sense of humanity's twofold pull toward the world, torn between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship. Whereas in the latter case man experiences the world (things, first and foremost, but also his fellow human beings) through impersonal, superficial and instrumental relations, in the former he instead meets the other in depth, thereby managing to truly be himself – authentic, in short. For Buber, every human being is essentially dialogue, and for this reason is also homo religiosus, because the authenticity of the I-Thou relationship rests on that which transcends the relationship itself.

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Federico Romagnoli
K-indie and Modern Rock, 1993-2025: A History of Korean Alternative Music (Miscellaneous: Rock History)

Originally, South Korea's counterculture had been voiced above all through folk music, with historic singer-songwriters such as Kim Min-ki (김민기), Hahn Dae-soo (한대수) and Jeong Tae-chun (정태춘). Rock, too, produced a few artists seen as outsiders to the rules of the industry and the yoke of the regime, some of whom were silenced, as happened to Shin Jung-hyeon (신중현), arrested in 1975 on the pretext of marijuana possession.
Starting in the 1980s, metal too helped fuel the rebellious spirit of the young. However, with the arrival of the 1990s something changed: with the advent of democracy, the protest-song movement had lost its grip on the masses and had been gradually smothered by commercial ballads, which dominated the local market from the second half of the 1980s onward.
Against this backdrop, in Seoul a new generation of musicians began to emerge, drawing on Anglo-American alternative rock and bending it into every possible shade, showing an ability to tear down stylistic barriers that was at times unknown even to the very sources of their inspiration (think of how some bands paired distorted guitars, folk ballads and dance rhythms). Before long, the local press began referring to this movement with the term modern rock, a label still used today.

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Alessandro Giustiniano
Basic Channel (Monograph)

On “Enforcement,” the title track is a cerebral shockwave, a rational and sensory manifesto in which flashes of sound illuminate perception and its own disorientation. It is the dissolution of memory and identity: every listen shifts depending on which element you focus on, be it the metallic kick, the swirling subwoofer, or the dense carpet of subtly modulated synths, which shift with no fixed anchor point, through minimal variations capable of altering the subconscious.
On side B, chaos finds order in Jeff Mills's mix, an anthill of filters and frequencies building invisible architectures. The EP closes with a seven-minute loop, stripped down to the bone until it becomes pure pulsation. “Enforcement” is not just a title, but an act of coercion that forces the listener to inhabit an unexplored continuum. The method allows sonic particles to repeat themselves without losing meaning, a techno that shifts from visionary entertainment into an all-consuming experience.
Just three tracks are enough to overturn the conventions of club music, elevating it to a textural dimension devoid of melody, where the rhythmic sequence becomes fluid environment and industrial matter. It's an acoustic, if not acousmatic, experiment that finds kinship with Roland Kayn's elektronische musik, the spatial research of Iannis Xenakis, and the 20th-century avant-gardes, cast in a brutalist, magnetic guise. The club is no longer just a space for dancing and gathering, but the projection of an unfathomable future.

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Francesco Inglima
Khmer Pop – Cambodia's Shattered Dream (Miscellaneous: Rock History)

“You're a prince, I'm not, but we're all going to die, so who cares, let's have a drink“

(Yol Aularong referring to Prince Norodom Sirivudh)

Imagine a city that shines. Not with gold or skyscrapers, but with neon lights, electric guitars and voices dancing between the grooves of a record. It's Phnom Penh, at the end of the 1960s.
You're young. You don't really understand politics, and you're not that interested anyway. What matters is the music. You have your idols. True airborne deities: a male voice that makes you tremble, a singer who seems to have descended from the sky, a group of boys in flowered shirts with guitars that talk. Every one of their songs is a ritual, every record a reliquary. You identify with their melodies, even if they sing of loves, of dreams, of cities you've never seen. You listen to them on the radio, follow them to concerts, dream of them at night. You never ask yourself where all this freedom comes from. You just breathe it in. And deep down, you know: you're not living a faded copy of the West. It's not merely an imitation of imported trends. No, what runs through Phnom Penh in these years has nothing to envy in Paris, London or San Francisco. It's an authentic, vivid ferment, one that fuses the sounds of rock'n'roll and soul with the scales of Khmer tradition, reinventing twist, yé-yé and surf as though they had been born right there. In those years, Cambodian pop is the future, is a dream, is the present, is yours.

Then, one day, the city falls silent.

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Daniel Moor
Jenny Hval – Classic Objects (Review)

In "Classic Objects", philosophical inquiry, political reflection, experimental performance practices and a critique of patriarchy all coalesce around a pop-music framework. Emotion and theoretical reflection coexist in a work that fully exploits the cognitive possibilities of music and language, opening up new vistas for both experimental and pop music, and crowning the career of an artist who finds fresh, original avenues of expression in multi- and interdisciplinarity.

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Marco Sgrignoli
New Chorality (Feature)

This is the memory of a time I got it right. I don't know how many people picked up on the piece back then – certainly fewer than if it had come out under a different byline, maybe in some Anglo-American publication – and rereading it now, I notice several passages I'd write more fluidly, more sharply today. But I remain convinced the insight was on point, and in a way I'm surprised it never caught on more widely through other channels. Out there, amid indie remakes and post-rock codas, a new musical sensibility had taken shape in the early 2000s: a cross-cutting, multicoloured non-scene that, under a shared "choral" spirit, connected Arcade Fire and Sigur Rós, múm, Sufjan Stevens and various other, less prominent artists.
In the years that followed, exploring micro-genres became one of my favourite musical pastimes. I had fun tracing back the roots of post-rock, briefly mapping the history of the sunshine pop scene, and pulling together the threads of the zigzags between progressive and new wave. But if I think of a moment when an article of mine really brought something significant into focus, I think of that one time I invented a genre entirely from scratch. And in how I defined it, I find much of what made those sounds unique – but also a great deal of myself.

Two music videos are emblematic of this: "Rebellion (Lies)" by Arcade Fire and "Glósóli" by Sigur Rós. [...] "Glósóli" directly depicts a march of children, immersed in Iceland's barren, unreal landscape. It all begins with a single boy, who calls others to him with the sound of a parade drum. Dressed in clothes from another era, the children cross a deserted road, pull some of their peers away from acts of boredom-driven vandalism, and rebuild half-collapsed stone markers as they pass. They then sleep, hand in hand, lying on the stone, and finally reach a green meadow overlooking a cliff. In an intensely charged sequence, they run together towards the cliff and, unexpectedly, begin swimming through the air, rising above the ocean.
In both videos, the neo-indie aesthetic of blurred, sepia-toned, autumnal imagery combines with an epic undertone that aims to turn delicate, essentially harmless suggestions into powerful surges of emotion. [...] The impression given by these "choral" acts [...] is that in singing they express a feeling that transcends them and concerns an entire community. This brings them closer, in certain respects, to the "represent" ethos of classic hip-hop than to the usual indie logic or – even less so – to any popstar mentality.
Indeed, a significant part of the music involved sits in that middle ground known as the midstream: pop that spreads by word of mouth and only rarely relies on the major media. It is this grassroots vocation for sharing, together with the invocation of a close bond with one's home territory, that makes this music, for the decade now drawing to a close, the heir to the role once played by folk music.

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Fabio Ferrara
Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream (33 rpm Visions)

Released in 1993 by the Smashing Pumpkins, "Siamese Dream" stands as one of the absolute high points of Nineties alternative rock. It's a work built on the balance between emotional fragility and sonic force, where Billy Corgan's layered guitars conjure monumental soundscapes without ever sacrificing melodic strength. Songs that have long since entered the collective imagination sit alongside more intimate moments, making up an album that still speaks with startling intensity decades on.

Telling its story today also means following the thread of a distant memory. There's the almost ritual gesture of pulling an old cassette tape out of its case, the initial hiss before the music starts, and the era when albums were discovered slowly, track by track. For years this record remained a silent companion, quietly layering emotions, suggestions and references. This review springs directly from that long journey: from the desire to finally give shape, in words, to a listening experience that has crossed the years without ever losing its spell.

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Gianfranco Marmoro
Blue Nile (Monograph)

Writing the Blue Nile monograph was one of the most rewarding pieces of work in my collaboration with Ondarock. At the time, I built up a network of contacts with Scottish journalists and musicians to gather news and trivia about a band that, across four albums, wrote one of the most important chapters in rock music, delivering a masterpiece of synthesis between poetic, melodic romanticism and elegant electronic beats, "Hats", a record that crossed the line between singer-songwriter craft, electronics and sophisti-pop with an original language often imitated but never matched. The story of the Scottish band is every bit as gripping as their recorded output, and it's intensely evoked by frontman Paul Buchanan's sole solo album, "Mid Air".

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Michele Bordi
Radiohead – Arena Sferisterio (Macerata), 20/08/2017 (Live Report)

Living in this part of the Marche also meant living with the distance from the noise of big events. So many times, over a beer among live-music fans, we'd joke about it: "Come on, let's get organised and get them to play the Sferisterio in Macerata!" A quip that always got a laugh, the idea seemed so absurd.
Then the earth started to shake and, suddenly, we ended up on everyone's lips. But it was a fleeting kind of fame, built on sensationalism and a hunger for scoops. Soon enough, Leopardi's hills sank back into anonymity, this time aching from wounds destined to stay open for a long while.
Not everyone was happy with that. What was needed was the intervention of a foreigner with black hair and a cool quiff, like something out of a comic book...

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Maria Teresa Soldani
Julee Cruise – Floating Into The Night (Pietra miliare)

"Floating Into The Night" is the album with which Julee Cruise entered not only the history of pop-rock but the mythology of American cinema. Her performance of "Falling" and "The Nightingale" in the first episode of "Twin Peaks", inside the Roadhouse bar, is unforgettable: there, Cruise becomes the voice that merges and fuses with the archetypal figure of the biker, conjuring up figures like Marlon Brando and James Dean, immortalised somewhere between fiction and reality, as well as films such as Kenneth Anger's "Scorpio Rising" (1963), Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider" (1969) and Francis Ford Coppola's "Rumble Fish" (1983). The genre itself is a creation in progress, straddling film music, ambient, jazz and sophisticated pop, born of the synergy between Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch and Julee Cruise, whose voice is also shaped by studio technology.

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Peppe Trotta
Claire Rousay – A Softer Focus (Review)

In her compulsively prolific output (more than twenty releases in two years, between albums, collaborations and short works), the starting point is often the numerous ambient recordings she gathers throughout her days, conceived not as mere data-cataloguing but as raw material to be shaped into a deeply introspective imaginative world. The sound of everyday life, used in its pure form or skilfully transfigured, thus becomes a vital element to be hybridised, generating a hypnagogic multiverse in which different languages merge seamlessly.
On "A Softer Focus", the intricate weave of field recordings, filtered vocal textures and found sounds is further expanded by the inclusion of readily assimilable harmonic elements. This new dimension emerges gradually, creating fertile short-circuits between concrete resonances and musical abstraction. The domestic intimacy of the bare noises on "Preston Ave" thus slips naturally into the comforting melodic motion of "Discrete (The Market)", emblematically ferried across by the clatter of a typewriter that suggests a constant suspension between reality and dream.

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Antonio Silvestri
Nas – Illmatic (Milestone)

I’ve been writing for OndaRock for about a decade, and I’ve carved out a space for myself among many writers I consider essential to my own musical education. One of the niches I’ve made my own is hip-hop, which I’m obviously not the only one covering, but which I help map out alongside some excellent colleagues. Introducing it to an audience that’s traditionally more pop and indie isn’t straightforward, and this milestone review was a small but significant challenge.

The anticipation for the debut electrifies the scene of the time, because Nas is still young, but the first album he's writing already promises to be something that will leave its mark. Even the title forgoes any humility, describing the project as something extreme and definitive: "Illmatic", to be understood as extremely "ill", roughly translatable as "sick", "twisted", but also "powerful" and "definitive". In fact, the artist's name and the title reveal very little, merely hinting that something incredible and unprecedented awaits, without giving the unsuspecting listener and buyer much more to go on.

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Claudio Lancia
Steve Shelley – Interview

25 years of OndaRock have given me many opportunities, like the chance to spend time with some of my idols. It's hard to pick just one moment, but I have an indelible memory of an interview I did with Steve Shelley, the legendary drummer of Sonic Youth, one of my favorite bands, sitting across from him at a table, before an Emma Tricca concert in a charming little square in Terracina, back in June 2018. It meant a lot to me, and the question was inevitable: Steve, what's life like after Sonic Youth? Here's his answer (you can read the rest of the interview at the link):

“You know, to me it's like Sonic Youth still exists. The band was actually never officially disbanded, and I still do things with both Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo (the band's two guitarists behind “Daydream Nation“, ed.). Every now and then we reissue something too, old recordings or shows. As a band we're not active right now, but there's a kind of aura, like something is still carrying on...”

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Valerio D’Onofrio
Rock Becomes Myth – The Best Rock Guitar Solos from the 60s to Today (feature)

An emblematic figure through and through, the guitarist has moved through decades of transformation, growing ever more iconic along the way: from the cursed, rebellious bluesman of 1950s rock'n'roll to the creator of hypnotic, lysergic melodies in the psychedelia of the 1960s, all the way to becoming an increasingly central figure with the rise of hard rock in the 1970s. With the birth of metal, between the late '70s and early 1980s, the guitarist becomes a kind of superhero, and the guitar itself almost a phallic prosthesis underscoring his limitless power.

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Michele Corrado
Afghan Whigs – Gentlemen (Milestone)

Far from wanting to treat grunge as some kind of protected geographical designation, but coming from Cincinnati, Ohio would be reason enough to strike the Afghan Whigs from the notorious "Seattle scene", into which they were lumped for convenience's sake after their debut "Big Top Halloween" (1988) and the sophomore effort "Up In It" (1990, their first for Sub Pop). Then again, back in those days, predicting how far and in which directions the granite-solid sound of Greg Dulli's band would expand, and how many and which influences it would swallow up, would have been a tough call. Guessing them all would have simply been impossible. Then, in 1992, came "Congregation", revelatory from its stunning cover art alone. A voluptuous Black woman lies on a red cloth, cradling a white infant in her arms. Both are naked, and the contact between their skins seals the indissoluble bond between white pop music and Black pop music. Casting the latter as the forebear of the former...

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Marco Bercella
Junior Boys – So This Is Goodbye (recensione)

Internet-era neo-romantics, electronic pop obsessives (young and old alike), fans of glossy indie fashion, perk up your ears and hold on tight, because up in chilly Canada there's still someone thinking of you. It's not impossible to match a stunning debut album's high standards, and Junior Boys are here to prove it. Having reached the ears of many enthusiasts two years ago with the exquisitely refined digital pop reiterations of "Last Exit", the classy duo now choose to climb even steeper hairpin bends, if that's possible, without ever giving up their trademark style.
If "Last Exit" owed its charm to designer-label alchemy that only occasionally gave way to pure songwriting, this new effort aims at different targets, drawing closer to the soft body of melody and harmonic phrasing. Pure and simple songs, in other words.
Alongside the familiar shape and the ethereal, dreamlike features of the compositions, which remain untouched, come new elements worth paying attention to. Glitch and minimal techno, once the founding cornerstones, now retreat into the fold of pop, softening until they hide behind voices and keyboards; arrangements that, while still meticulously crafted, stop showing off and settle instead into either romantic warmth or the dense eroticism of the tracks...

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Paolo Ciro
Subsonica – Subsonica (Milestone)

Given the speed at which our era creates and destroys everything on the web, twenty-five years of OndaRock are something of a miracle. I've only lived through part of the journey, having come aboard in 2014, but that was enough to let me meet plenty of artists in person and tell their stories. Among the moments I tend to remember most fondly is the milestone review of Subsonica's debut, which this very year turns thirty. For me, and perhaps for many Torinesi of my generation, that record feels like coming home.

Subsonica's debut is, even today, a snapshot of a perfect space-time, contained within the few hundred metres separating Giancarlo (the venue at the Murazzi) from CasaSonica, immersed in the shimmer of the post-rave counterculture born out of the social centres. We're in Turin, but the snapshot also captures other experiences across Italy well, like that of Casino Royale, the first to pair typically dub structures with languages indebted to the Bristol sound on their "Sempre più vicini" (1995). The alternation of soul and hip-hop stylistic traits, the rubbery basslines, loop culture, off-beat rhythms: these are all important reference points for the construction of the Subsonica project, but what really preoccupies the Turin outfit is above all the need to break free from a certain provincial aura through some healthy, self-satisfied experimentation.
If in the 1980s the title of a low-budget film ran "I ragazzi di Torino sognano Tokyo e vanno a Berlino" ("Turin's kids dream of Tokyo and go to Berlin"), by early 1997 the new generation of Torinesi no longer needs to dream of other places: they're perfectly happy right where they are, in the empyrean of the Murazzi, gathering around a band that embodies its zeitgeist.

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Gabriele Benzing
Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell (review)

“I don’t know where to begin”. It's hard to imagine a more disarming confession from someone whose job is to tell stories. To find yourself so overwhelmed that you've lost your words. To be afraid even to face the silence.
It's hard to imagine it especially coming from someone like the eclectic Sufjan, the one who toured America across fifty albums. But on "Carrie & Lowell" things are different: "This is not my art project. This is my life". And the game of shape-shifting gives way to the flesh and blood of real experience.

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Martina Vetrugno
Mother Love Bone – Apple (Milestone)

In the collective imagination, the apple symbolizes original sin, but it also represents, universally and on every level, the giving and receiving of love. Among the countless earthly temptations that, for someone passionate about music, often translate into vinyl records and concert tickets, one day I found myself face to face with an American first pressing of Mother Love Bone's "Apple." The thrill of holding it in my hands, and then (sadly) having to put it back on the shelf at Transformer, a record shop in Bologna that, like so many others, no longer exists today, is something that still comes back to me now.

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