Afterhours

Alongside Cccp/Csi, Marlene Kuntz and a handful of others, Afterhours managed to push back the boundaries of Italian indie-rock, helping a certain kind of sound come out into the open and win over a substantial audience - not just in terms of records sold, but above all thanks to their huge success as a live act.

"Hai paura del buio?" is the summit of their arc, as well as one of the absolute peaks of Italian rock in the '90s.

As sometimes happens, the record was born in a difficult, almost paradoxical moment for the Milanese band: Afterhours had been active since the late '80s and had been one of the most promising acts on the Italian indie rock scene (they were invited to represent Italy at New York's "New Music Seminar"), but after the release of the excellent "Germi" and the collapse of their label, Vox Pop, the group suddenly found itself without a home. It was precisely during this stalled phase that the nineteen songs of "Hai paura del buio?" came into being.

It wasn't easy to find a label bold enough to take on such an ambitious work. In the end it was Mescal who signed the group, opening the doors to success for the quintet (Manuel Agnelli, the band's leader, on vocals and guitar; Xabier Iriondo on guitar; Andrea Viti on bass; Giorgio Prette on drums; Dario Ciffo on violin).

If the previous album had made clear what the band's style was (melody and noise, cut-up lyrics, pop experimentation and irony), "Hai paura del buio?" shows a group capable of ranging across disparate genres and sounds (Manuel Agnelli himself called it "the Italian Mellon Collie").

Variety, then, is the watchword, yet nothing feels scattered: the record is instead remarkably cohesive and engaging; the tracks flow pleasantly, and one never gets a sense of tedium or déjà-vu.

Musically, the starting point doesn't differ much from "Germi": a hard, incisive post-grunge sound, full of guitar distortion. This is the paradigm behind tracks like the famous "Male di miele", regarded as the Italian Smells Like Teen Spirit, with its adrenaline-fuelled electricity and ferocious riff, or the equally furious "Veleno".

But there's no doubt that the sound, compared to the previous album, has softened considerably: ballads now dominate, worthy heirs to that "Dentro Marilyn" which managed to bewitch even Mina. Among the most accomplished are "Rapace", where rage and melody alternate, the dark "Pelle", where the violin conjures almost classical atmospheres, and the sweet, ethereal "Voglio una pelle splendida", its guitar arpeggio only sporadically interrupted by feedback.

By contrast, the more energetic moments take the shape of small hardcore-punk shards, as in the devastating "Dea", "Lasciami leccare l'adrenalina" and the furious "Sui giovani d'oggi ci scatarro su".

Perhaps, though, what gives the album its greatest value are precisely the tracks that stand as a one-off (or nearly so) in the band's career, such as the baroque symphony for piano and violin "Come vorrei", the acoustic vignette "Simbiosi", the long bacchanal of "Punto G", in which Xabier Iriondo indulges in dreaming up innovative, disorienting sounds, or the experimental digressions of "Senza finestra", psychedelic, distorted and deeply unsettling, and "Questo pazzo pazzo mondo di tasse".

On the lyrical side too, the album shines for the variety of themes it tackles, finding a common thread in the idea of a desolate, dark world with no way out.

Manuel Agnelli's lyrics, clearly inspired by William Burroughs, attempt to borrow his tools, drawing heavily on cut-up technique (the writing method in which a text is chopped up, even word by word, and reassembled to create a new one). The lyrics, then, are in most cases on the verge of nonsense, dense with imagery and suggestion. Even the love songs bear the mark of a highly personal writing style: from the aggressive symbolism of "Rapace" ("Verrò come un rapace a mutilare lo scorpione dentro nel tuo cuore"), to the explicit sexual references of "Elymania" ("Giocattolo vibrante in te, cola miele che sa di me"), all the way to flashes of misogynistic resentment - "Forse non è proprio legale sai ma sei bella vestita di lividi" ("Lasciami leccare l'adrenalina").

A livid, biting sarcasm comes through, as in "1.9.9.6.", where the "architects" referred to in the lyrics are none other than "fake alternative types who, to feel at peace with their conscience, vote for the far left and hang around social centres, but let others take the beatings while they retreat to their studios, their four-hundred-square-metre apartments", as Agnelli would later explain. These fake alternative types resurface in "Sui giovani d'oggi ci scatarro su" (a title that says it all), with its famous chorus "Come pararsi il culo e la coscienza è un vero sballo, sabato in barca a vela lunedì al Leoncavallo". "Musicista contabile", on the other hand, takes aim at artists who sell out to the market ("Yeah, questa è la realtà del musicista contabile, yeah, vola fantasia d'imprenditore volatile").

Finally, some tracks retreat into a disorienting hermeticism, like “Senza finestra” (“I can like you as you are, but I am not like you, fat and ugly soul, without a window”) or “Come vorrei” (“Strychnine, if it's a girl, she'll have the life of a crazed cell”).

A surprising album, then, essential to understanding the evolution of indie rock made in Italy, and still one of its most beloved and celebrated chapters.

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09/04/2008