JEAN FABRY - Rotoballe

Linguistic recycling in the lowland countryside. Melancholy retro-modernism. Upheavals. "I'm searching for my life, I'm roaming a bit around this world for the one true reason I'm searching for my life, I'm roaming a bit around this world for the one true reason I'm searching for my life, I'm roaming a bit around this world …".

Taking their cue, and their name, from a picturesque (and now departed) singer-songwriter from the Lower Romagna, Jean Fabry started out as a duo playing directly in dancehalls back in 1994, and arrive (now a five-piece) at their official debut after a handful of excellent demos - a full ten years later, not unlike the Supreme Dicks. If that sounds like a badge of quality, a gentle scolding is in order for labels and critics alike, but there's no point crying over it.

In a word, JeanFabry's music is pop - crooked, elusive, sharp-witted but shot through with flashes of silliness, always carrying that immature, amateurish spirit that keeps it evergreen.

On a first, careless listen the record can seem bare and a bit too clean, given the frequent use of lo-fi essentials like old monophonic synths, antediluvian drum machines and an upright bass forever teetering on the edge of dissonance. But compared to their earlier home-recorded efforts, necessarily rougher and dirtier, the choice to polish things up here is deliberate and well-judged, putting greater emphasis on the pop side and the songwriting. Because "Rotoballe" is also an album you find yourself humming - in the shower, sure, why not, but also, preferably, wandering through the countryside, or when, swept up in a fit of regression, you dig the old Meccano set back out.

A band "adrift among topographic maps, with a calendar missing all its Sundays," Jean Fabry get off to a fine start with the carefree rock'n'roll of "Rotoballe," torn between indie-rock temptations, dissonant meditative outbursts and synth flourishes colouring in the background. It's a poetics of contamination between elements that, on one hand, isn't ashamed to bask ambiguously in the rhetoric of "things were better when they were worse," while on the other hand feels no need whatsoever to reach for the well-worn sensationalist imagery of grafts, manipulation and alienation so common in countless urban subcultures. And so the polystyrene sky of "Punk Mentale" carries an easy, instantly catchy melody, a bit like certain moments from the Pavement songbook. "Il lamento del venditore di libri" is then the track most clearly rooted in synth-pop, a strand that runs throughout the record. The cadence is martial, underlined by assorted analogue gear and accordion, right up to the invocations that close out the song.

Things kick back into gear with the catchy, brisk "Ma mi sa di no", somewhere between Capossela and the Violent Femmes of "Halloweed Ground", again in a slightly postmodern key, as if sung in a junk shop at closing time. On "C.d.A" the accordion returns to cradle the album's most conventionally "sentimental" song, easy to picture in hillside settings - much like the ones the band often plays live - which, just to keep things interesting, spitefully closes out on the noise of a supermarket...

Closing things out is the cryptic "I pappi dei pioppi" (you really have to see the band live to understand what "pappi dei pioppi" even means), a solid choral melody punctuated by guitar and accordion before being pulled along by a synth-and-drum-machine refrain of a kind not heard since the days of OMD, building to a crescendo of BPMs in the finale that dissolves against a wall of old, analogue sounds, while old Jean Fabry - the real one - reappears to say goodbye.

Children of the provinces, where being out of step isn't necessarily cool, JeanFabry keep quietly (and lucidly) shuffling the deck, waiting for that "Zavaglio Generale" that sooner or later will sweep everything away.

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30/04/2026