ROSOLINA MAR - Before And After Dinner

Rosolina Mar, or: how to play convincing rock music in 2005.

With an apparently simple formula – guitar, guitar, drums, plenty of riffs, just enough solos, a well-calibrated taste that balances winks at the past with hearty doses of the present – but the result of a constant, carefully considered evolution.

If the trio's debut (the self-titled album released by Wallace in 2004) was a first attempt at cohesion still oriented towards sprawling, "post"-leaning landscapes (the proverbial promising-but-unripe first album), this second leg of the journey for the three musicians from Verona shows us a mature band that flawlessly updates the power-trio formula and – we'll never tire of repeating it – carries rock, the sweaty kind, the fun kind, into territory once dominated by syncopated arpeggios and six-string equations.

With this "Before And After Dinner", the Veneto trio takes stock of their work and their listening habits, refining their language and more precisely defining certain coordinates that were only imagined on their first outing: what they offer our ears is, in short, an attempt at synthesis, a summary that's anything but orderly and standard of their burning passion for rock in its fullest sense.

Like a great photographer, the three-headed animal known as Rosolina Mar seeks out both the panoramic view and, at the same time, an eye for the sudden detail, the one that leaps out like a spark. We mentioned synthesis, and the term can't help but come to mind while listening to "Protopapetti", where the furious syncopation of Fugazi merges with Chicago-style cadences, mutating again and again, and "Mingozo di mongozo", all sinuous, sour funk courtesy of the two guitars, orphaned of a bass whose absence is fully justified by how well the whole thing works, made even more rhythmic and skittish by the vaguely Latin percussion that gradually works its way in.

A blend of passions, one might say, and wouldn't be far off the mark, since within the mix you can make out traces of various rock strands: indie (the wave-like cadences of "Il culto del cavo elettrico"), college rock (in "Flesh Dance" you can almost hear a less buttoned-up, less schoolish Weezer), the hard rock of Led Zeppelin and Ac/Dc, and the twisted blues of Captain Beefheart first, and Us Maple later.

And what to say, then, about "Amore Tossico", the only possible hybrid between Dinosaur Jr. and Police…?

There's plenty to enjoy, in short: this game of learned revisionism and organized delirium keeps its freshness even after repeated listens, against all odds.

It wasn't easy to play around with rock like this, but the three members of Rosolina, all technically skilled and musically sharp, have pulled it off.

(As a side note to the album review, we should add that Rosolina's game also works very well live: take the same ingredients described above, shake them very, very, very thoroughly, and you get a show that delivers on everything the album promises, with furious, engaging performances, a few gems — shards of King Crimson or Ac/Dc and other quotes popping up when you least expect them — and a couple of tracks from the first album that still hold up against the current ones. In other words: the revenge of guitars and physicality?)

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30/04/2026