Post Nebbia - Under a roof of "Pastafrolla"

The Po Valley is known for its particularly damp, foggy and grey climate. Carlo Corbellini and the members of Post Nebbia, who grew up in Padua's Arcella neighbourhood, know this well, and after weighing various options (which the frontman “refuses to mention under any circumstances”) they chose a name that already sums up the provincial backdrop where they took their first steps, between neighbourhood fairs and parish festivals where they used to play covers of Elvis Presley and Arctic Monkeys, but also that taste for the surreal and the postmodern that would come to strongly define their studio work.

The group was in fact formed in a parish music school, through the meeting of Carlo Corbellini himself (voice and guitar), Niccolò Bosio (keyboards), Andrea Cadel (bass) and Riccardo Chillin (drums), when they were 10 years old. At 14, after leaving the music school, Carlo began writing his first songs and taking an interest in production. In 2022 Giovanni Dodini (drums) and Giulio Patarnello (keyboards) replaced Riccardo Chillin and Niccolò Bosio, forming what remains the current line-up.

The band's sound stems from the home-recording explorations of Carlo Corbellini, born in 1999. Among the earliest influences are the psych-rock of Tame Impala and the eclecticism of Kevin Parker, a reference point the band would later try to move away from. It would indeed be reductive to stop at these names, since the listening habits of Corbellini and his bandmates range across many different genres, to the point where they describe themselves as “a genre-bending psych band” in their Spotify bio. From the aforementioned psych-rock to funk, from hip-hop to prog-rock, from Italian library music to sample-based producers like Madlib and The Alchemist, the band from Veneto combines predominantly Anglophone influences with the choice to write lyrics in Italian.

Born with an underground spirit and shaped within the Padua scene—which counts the label Dischi Sotterranei, Radio Sherwood, Il Pedro and, more recently, the Arcella Bella festival among its key hubs—Post Nebbia released their first self-produced album Prima Stagione in 2018. A work in which some of the sounds that would later reach full maturity on the subsequent albums Canale Paesaggi (2020) and Entropia Padrepio (2022) can already be traced.

Among these first seven tracks, one that particularly stands out is “Žižek”, named after the famous Slovenian philosopher and intellectual, the only song from the first album to also be revived in some setlists of the Entropia Padrepio tour, and in which the synths of “Luminosità alta” and the dissociated lyrics that would dominate the following album already echo:

Il tipo che sta dentro lo specchio

Non mi dice più che cosa fare

Ho paura di sapere chi è

Dischi Sotterranei, the label of the Veneto scene to which Post Nebbia belong, chose to keep releasing new music even during the lockdown period, despite there being no chance of playing live. On 23 October 2020, the album Canale Paesaggi was thus released, a surreal and hallucinated psych-rock journey into the world of media and television—particularly regional TV, with its endless flow of advertising—full of references to the Italian trash culture that Carlo is a big fan of. A second-hand trash, salvaged from YouTube and social media, from algorithmic bubbles, from the “glass people who give me the day's news” (as the lyrics of “Persone di vetro” put it), the result of which is an alienated, decadent world that the band answers with irony and sarcasm, with an evident taste for the postmodern, referenced through one of its masters, the writer David Foster Wallace, as well as through nods to the American nonsense comedy of Eric André and Tim & Eric. The title track and opener of the album is already a statement of intent, with the voice of Alessandro Orlando, icon of Italian TV shopping channels, sampled, chopped up and layered with disorienting effects and glitches, which lead into the band's most iconic track, still their most-streamed song on Spotify to this day: “Televendita di quadri”.

Quando esco a camminare

Mi stanno pilotando

Con il telecomando

There's someone deciding

Everything I do

And it's not me

A voice with a disillusioned tone wrapped in reverb, psychedelic-tinged synths, funky basslines and ironic, dystopian lyrics in which Carlo Corbellini continues his exploration of dissociation and alienation. "Even I am for sale, and the price keeps dropping, every second more," "I'm ruining myself for you," "TV shopping of paintings, TV shopping of me": the track mixes expressions typical of commercial television with a total loss of control over the self, who is literally sold on a shopping channel and stripped of any kind of agency. If in "Televendite di quadri" there's still someone with a remote control choosing on the subject's behalf, in "La mia bolla" the target becomes the algorithms of social networks and streaming platforms, which only show content users are likely to enjoy, sealing them inside a bubble that shapes their view of the world: "My bubble is me, and it only sees what I see". The subject definitively becomes an object.

As if in a constant zapping between channels, the 9 tracks of Canale Paesaggi alternate with outros and intros that are often glitchy and noisy, as in the case of the Ave Maria translated into Japanese by Google at the end of "La mia bolla", which in a sense introduces some of the themes of the following album, Entropia Padrepio. Some tracks spill into brief instrumental codas, as in "Interlace", or into solutions like "Streaming", which in just 46 seconds sums up many of the album's themes, from the overload of entertainment information to the state of perpetual boredom born of an endless search for content:

I can't make up my mind about what to watch

All this variety doesn't make me think anymore

I don't want to breathe this digital smog anymore

I've been stuck for an hour in the tunnel of boredom

The influences are many, at times disorienting and surprising, starting with the striking closeness of "Televendite a quadri" to the sound the Arctic Monkeys built for the crooner turn sealed by "Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino". But across the nine tracks you also find funk leanings ("Vietnam"), a certain Thundercat-style fusion ("Streaming"), sixties influences ("Persone di vetro"), and vaguer echoes of Tame Impala scattered more or less everywhere.

Even though it's only their second studio work, Canale Paesaggi already shows the great ability of this Veneto-based outfit to craft compelling concepts and atmospheres, all through a personal style that blends diverse influences, helping to make the album particularly accomplished and original within the Italian underground scene.

Buoyed by the album's success, in 2021 the Veneto band embarked on their first Italian tour, while also collaborating with various artists, from producer Golden Years to Nico LaOnda, with whom they released the single "Veneto d'estate", reworking the "Io vado al mare, e voi che fate?" of "Vento d'estate" by Roman artists Niccolò Fabi and Max Gazzè into a typically Venetian setting where "Io schivo le zanzare, voi che fate?"

The strong response from both audiences and critics for the previous album was confirmed, and even surpassed, with the follow-up Entropia Padrepio, released on May 20, 2022, again on Dischi Sotterranei, and produced with Fight Pausa of 72 Hour Post Fight. This time the concepts at play are religion and faith, born out of Corbellini's discovery of a spiritual need during the forced isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic. It's a theme explored from every angle, moving from an almost shamanic spirituality to decidedly more pragmatic reflections. A double nature, caught between the concept of dispersion and "entropy", and the spiritual, communal reunification of religion, summed up in the word "Padrepio", evoking the typical small-town Christian iconography.

But in Corbellini's songwriting, a constant dualism is reflected even more clearly than in the past. There's an obvious spiritual influence, matched by a vivid sense of materiality. There's a detached sense of decadence, yet at the same time a pop lightness with a retro flavour rings out. There is (as perhaps the title itself suggests) a kind of trait d'union between a profane embrace of post-modern alienation (borrowed, as it is, from a concept belonging to physics) and a sacred imagery with distinctly popular overtones. And it works. The registers combine without any forcing, shaping an album that's coherent in its ambivalence. The driving refrains start from solidly rooted contemporary it-pop languor, but often reach back to draw on contortions that recall both Battiato and the most acid-drenched Beatles.

Everything is steeped in an aura of mysticism, propped up by swells of synth, either expansive and apocalyptic or scattered into oblique, dissonant glitches. Elsewhere the album comes to rest on French-flavoured electro reinforcements, while retaining the knack of shrewdly veering toward phrasing that's vaguely (and somewhat simplistically) cinematic prog.

The album alternates ironic moments, as in the line "Io voglio credere a queste cazzate da sciamano" from "Pensiero magico", with others that are more intimate and heartfelt, like the plea in "Viale Santissima Trinità": "Con cosa ti devo sostituire, mio Signore?", set within a long central crescendo that explodes into an instrumental coda driven by a synth solo. It's a return to the atmospheres Corbellini and the rest of the band grew up in, inspired by recorded bells from the Parrocchia della Santissima Trinità that glitch into noisy electronic sounds and crowded buses ("Qualcuno ha visto Gesù dentro il parcheggio della pizzeria"). "Viale Santissima Trinità", in fact, is a street in Padua, in the Arcella district, a five-minute walk from the Centro Sociale Pedro, part of a sort of personal geography of the places where the band grew up, a clash of imageries that (so far) keeps inspiring Carlo Corbellini's lyrics.

Psych-rock, funk in the vein of Talking Heads (especially in the guitars of "Voce fuori campo"), prog-rock à la Goblin, new wave of the 1980s, Scott Heron and Brian Jackson, the Beatles and Brazilian music are among the references cited in the playlist that previewed the album's release, in which the Veneto band tries to break away from the compositional structures of their earlier records. While in their first works the songs often started from a loop before adding more layers in the chorus, on Entropia Padrepio they push to make the arrangements more dynamic and extreme, resulting at times in smoother sounds, at others in more schizophrenic ones. Among the former is certainly the lead single "Cuore semplice", a refined, Beatles-esque pop song that bursts into a highly effective chorus made of synths that come crashing in after a brief pause, as if breaking down a door.

Inspired by the Japanese anime "Evangelion", the album's closing track, titled "Oltre la soglia", is a journey into another dimension, a kind of reunification with the other through the dissolution of the self, echoing the cover art drawn by Familia Povera (which recalls the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan from "Watchmen"), in a powerful, mystical final catharsis:

Lungo il cammino che ci porta alla fine non mi incontrerai più

Io mi smaterializzo e volo dentro la luce senza esistere più

Nessuna mancanza, nessun senso d'invidia, nessuna nostalgia

Oltre la soglia nessun senso di vuoto abiterà dentro me

Post Nebbia are touring Italy with their new album, starting with 22 summer dates that took them to the stages of Spring Attitude in Rome and Mi Ami in Milan, before heading back out across Italy in winter with a club tour of another 22 dates, 8 of which sold out (Ferrara, Rome, Bari, Milan, Bologna, Turin, Pisa and Padua), closing with another sold-out show at Santeria in Milan, joined onstage by Luca Bais, Fight Pausa, Myss Keta and Montag. In the summer of 2023, Post Nebbia carried on with another summer tour, including dates in Locarno and Paris, establishing themselves as one of the reference points of the Dischi Sotterranei label and repeatedly taking part in the iconic Festa organized every year by the label, one of the most eagerly awaited and celebrated events on the Veneto underground scene and beyond.

Meanwhile, the band keeps collaborating with other artists, appearing as featured guests on the albums "Club Topperia" by Myss Keta (May 26, 2022), "Diviso Due" by Luca Bais (May 13, 2022), "Hotel Souvenir" by Dente (April 7, 2023) and "Gara 7" by Johnny Marsiglia (June 16, 2023), showing a particular versatility of genres and influences. A collaboration currently in production with Fight Pausa of 72 Hour Post Fight has also been announced, called 72 Hour Post Nebbia: it will be presented at the Linecheck Music Meeting and Festival, held between Milan and Bologna from November 21 to 25.

An ideal meeting point between a modern psychedelic language and an 80s "retromania" that dominates much of today's Italian pop (though the Veneto band draws on the hazier, wave-leaning shades of it), Post Nebbia confirm themselves, in any case, as a name to keep a close eye on, given the evolution of a homegrown alt-pop movement that has been rather stuck in place for quite some time now.

With their new record Pista Nera (2024), Post Nebbia deliver their post-nuclear, post-genocide, post-minimum-wage, post-welfare-collapse, post-brain-drain, post-global-warming, post-online-university Christmas album. Either way, there's only one truth, and it looks like that house made of "Pastafrolla" that is our world: held together by flour and eggs and ready to collapse at the first rain, turning into rubble. The shapeless kind. The kind that blocks the road. “Era tutta una bugia/ La montagna con i tuoi/ La notte al mare con i fra/ Ad aspettare l’alba/ Mi son detto una bugia/ Quando mi son detto che/ Sarebbe stato tutto ok/ Ma quel mondo non è qui con me”. Words and images that pave the way for a touching form of awareness, charged with urgency, something to say now or never. And there is certainly something generational about taking stock of a personal and collective disillusionment, right at the turning point of turning 25, carrying anger inside, along with disorientation and fear.

At the same time, though, the images portraying this "Statonatura", the carcass of a world defended by barbed wire, are so powerful, so visionary and dystopian that they draw in any listener. The discourse is as precise and sharply focused as the chant-like whisper of Carlo Corbellini manages to become a scream, when he invites you to contemplate the seed of destruction beyond the "schermo della call su Google Meet".

Pista Nera is a rock album. Inside it are three musicians in search of a songwriter, and a songwriter in symbiosis with three musicians. Alongside Corbellini (who produces here, stepping in for Fight Pausa, involved only in the mixing stage) are Giulio Patarnello, who warms everything up with his Wurlitzer piano chords and Prophet synth pads, Andrea Cadel's bass, and the dry, almost garage-rock drumming (except for the motorik groove somewhere between Can and Original Mirrors on "Statonatura", and the June Of 44-style decompositions of "Kent Brockman") of Giovanni Dodini.

The oblique, psych-pop flavor of Entropia Padre Pio and Canale paesaggi still lingers beneath the surface. Here the timbres are sharper, the structures aim for essentiality, and the sound has the tightness of a live performance. But listening more closely, you can pick up threads of continuity between a track like "Notte limpida" and the post-rock digressions of songs like "Viale Santissima Trinità" or "Vietnam", to name just two of the many we'd be curious to hear played live by this tight-knit lineup, now gearing up for a tour that will take them around Italy and to the prestigious Dutch showcase ESNS (Eurosonic Noorderslag). A continuity, as mentioned, embodied by the harmonic flair of the songwriting.

There's always that restless chord arriving, the alluring habit of never quite resolving the harmony, adding a touch of unpredictability to the mix that almost echoes the light-hearted way of saying "there's no escape", so dear to masters of irony like Os Mutantes or Secos & Molhados. Hear it to believe it.

(Contributions by Claudio Lancia, Giovanni Epistolato)

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