MOSQUITOS - Socialhaze

We could be under California's dark, scorching sky, drinking beer or third-rate tequila outside a venue packed with people and smoke, from which comes the muffled echo of another band playing that murky blend of rock, folk and psychedelia that someone decided to call Paisley Underground. It could be the heart of the Eighties, and California could just as easily resemble the arid expanses cut through by the Frontier, or the frozen Midwest backcountry. There could be anyone at all up on that stage in there. Maybe four guys in boots or sneakers who grew up listening to everything white America had to teach them, ready to drive up and down the continent in a beat-up old van, sleeping badly on the dirty floors of abandoned factories or deconsecrated churches, sharing nights and days that run too long with an ever-changing cast of people, brainless girls and heartless men.

Listening to this new Mosquitos record — well, listening to pretty much anything Mosquitos have ever written and played — we could really imagine ourselves immersed in a dream just like that. Instead, no: the story here is a different one. No California, no America, no Eighties: here we're at home, today, here we're on the margins, beyond the very idea of periphery, right in the middle of rarefied, drowsy lands caught in their own eternal present. This is where those four guys put their band together well over a decade ago, and this is where they keep making their music. In Frosinone City, State of Ciociaria.

This record is called "Socialhaze", and it's packed with Mosquitos' passion for the American sound. A passion that manifests itself in a highly varied way: the ten tracks range across different canons, with nods that are exquisitely alt-country, others college-rock, and others still verging on post-punk. Ballads and mid-tempos, tightly constructed songs, never lacking in convincing melodic ideas. And if we wanted to go down the rabbit hole of reference points, we'd never stop. Above all, though, there's certainly Dream Syndicate, Feelies, Wire, Jayhawks, early Rem (and, truth be told, even a touch of Pearl Jam: isn't the framework of "Walk For Ever" more or less the same as "Smile"?).

Beyond a guitar riff here and there that's maybe a touch reckless, Mosquitos know how to play — just as Mario Martufi knows how to sing — really well: that's another reason why the result is decidedly good. Then there's the usual question of language, of course, something we'll all keep arguing about for as long as we care to talk about music: why write songs in English when the market you're actually aiming at, especially live, is essentially Italian? The feeling is that if a band like this, while staying true to its musical reference points and cultivating such songwriting skill, dropped English in favor of their mother tongue, we'd be looking at something considerably more powerful. After all, maybe America is further away than it seems, and what's already a solid part of music history on the other side of the ocean could, under the right conditions, still write genuinely new pages over here.

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25/02/2012