NHILE - Nuvole

We first came across Nhile a couple of years ago, around the time of their self-released debut "Far Away From Here", a delicate effort poised between ethereal electro-acoustics and darker-hued fascinations.

In the two years between that promising debut and the twenty-seven minutes of music contained in the new "Nuvole", quite a bit has changed for the Turin-based duo of Massimo Ordazzo and Paolo Della Rocca; while their penchant for a shifting, impalpable musical formula remains intact, the references to a rather dark wave sound, filtered through both synthetic pulsations and dreamy ambient flows, have become more explicit.

Another substantial novelty is the use of Italian vocals on the first three tracks of the album, while the remaining three (separated by the brief ambient interlude "0") return - with noticeably improved English diction - to two original pieces plus an ambitious cover of "Dagger" by Slowdive. The extraordinary quality of the original song and the difficulty of the reworking, built around piano notes and slender rarefactions, nonetheless highlight a certain discrepancy between this episode and the rest of a record that once again reveals some limitations in writing songs populated, in fairly balanced fashion, by reworkings of models evidently very dear to Ordazzo and Della Rocca - Cure and Joy Division, but also Cocteau Twins and Sigur Rós - yet almost never effective on their own terms beyond the admittedly pleasant atmospheres.

Rather curiously, the very choice of Italian for half of the tracks on "Nuvole" does not do the overall result any favours, instead letting more than a few doubts surface about the somewhat forced refinement of the lyrics and vocals, which together seem to suffer more than necessary from that self-referential Godano-esque taste for poetry and for delivery somewhere between detached and hieratic ("Esco da me/ scompongo il paesaggio", "Onirica accendi le notti turbate/ da fulmini ed incendi perduti nel sonno").

This "Nuvole" is not a record to dismiss, yet it remains a rather uncertain transitional moment for a duo whose potential is anything but ordinary - a duo for whom the inevitable moment of truth, and the fuller definition of an artistic and songwriting identity that still shows a touch too much naivety and hesitation, is naturally left to their "fateful" third effort.

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26/02/2011