BARTOLINI - Bart Forever

Second album for Giuseppe Bartolini, twenty-seven years old, singer-songwriter by trade with a passion for synth-pop and guitars. Having recently placed a couple of songs on Netflix for the final season of the series "Summertime", Bartolini now delivers his second album to the world, "Bart Forever", for which he chose a childhood photo as the cover image.

The opening track, "108", kicks things off, and the effect is immediately disorienting: it sounds like an à-la Interpol riff with a vocal line clearly influenced by the style of Achille Lauro laid over it. Nothing new, but it's put together in a genuinely original way.

Elsewhere it's not too hard to spot connections with the Italian pop of Calcutta (for instance, in "Fulmini"), as he rolls out the kind of language that well represents his peers and their daily routines. There's talk of love, disappointment, bad luck, loneliness, the desire to find yourself again and reconnect with others, anxieties embedded in a crushing post-adolescence, in which the last thing on these characters' minds is any rush to grow up — a feeling that dissolves into nothing the moment they turn twenty.

The record features four guest appearances, including Lil Kaneki of Psicologi on "Non piove", for a work written overall with the intent of giving a "rougher" edge compared to what the Calabrian singer-songwriter (now based in Rome) has put out so far. Packing tradition and modernity, digital and analog, wave and it-, but also brit-, pop into a single container, Bartolini offers up nine slices of life as lived in any provincial town — never too small to get bored in, nor big enough to satisfy the expectations of someone who hasn't been a teenager for quite some time, but hasn't yet reached the end of their twenties either.

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13/07/2022