Fine Before You Came

I threw punches in every direction just to get out of a paper bag

Found places where, deep down, nobody cares where you park

And walked in circles for hours and hours

Never looking up, for fear of admitting you're afraid

I called my failures bad luck

Damned bad luck

("Vixi")

Where do those punches land? Maybe at the sky, even though you never stop to actually stare at it. A sky that – if you decide to reckon with it – can press down on your bones until it crushes them, whether it's the white-painted ceiling of your house or an oppressive grey vastness creeping in through the window. "Expressive as a block of cast iron", as the author of one of the most celebrated Italian coming-of-age novels of the Nineties would put it, describing that same sky over his native Bologna. But above Jacopo Lietti's head, in Milan, it probably wasn't much different. And it won't be any different anywhere else in the world, either. That sky will look the same to anyone who turns it into a storeroom for their own fears. Throwing punches at it is as easy as it is pointless; and yet in life we all end up doing it, careful all the while to keep our eyes down. Because looking it in the face takes real courage; nothing scares us more than fear itself.

The scream of "Vixi" thus becomes a desperate generational anthem. If you can feel it in your bones, you can't stay indifferent to it; it photographs you, strips you bare, grabs you by the hair and drags you bodily in front of the mirror. It freezes you solid the exact moment it reveals that you're the one throwing those punches.

All of this happens in 2009. A genuinely ambiguous period for the Italian alternative scene. The term "indie" is still spared the inflation that will make it the property of pop culture in the years to come, still proudly marking a status of detachment from the mainstream. Yet the tail end of the Noughties presents itself as a particularly lean moment; the great banquet of the Nineties limelight, though able to stretch on into the early days of the new millennium, has by now wound down, just as the more niche (yet still significant) wave ridden chiefly by bands from the Homesleep and Santeria stables has also run its course.

By decade's end, on one hand the attention of the independent circuit has become more focused on a certain strand of singer-songwriter fare (which will act as a kind of anteroom to the pop shift that will reshape the very idea of "indie" within a few years); on the other, the collectivist character of the movement as a whole has faded away. The task of keeping the spark alive falls chiefly to La Tempesta, the label founded in 2000 by Enrico Molteni (bassist of Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti), which quickly becomes the main hub for the big names still active (and still surviving) in the Italian alternative sphere.

While a certain fragmentation of the Italian indie community is undeniable, by contrast the scattered undergrowth of the deeply underground world is vibrating and pulsing more than ever. Within this landscape, one scene in particular is going through a season of real ferment: emocore. The emo bloodletting of the early 2000s had brutally vandalized its ethics and aesthetics, but in doing so it had also had the merit of drawing attention – albeit within a narrow circle – to the genre's purer strains. In Italy this gave rise to a lively, passionate scene, one able to reinterpret the deepest roots of post-hardcore and emo screamo in an original way. Bands like La Quiete, Raein and The Death Of Anna Karina had emerged, around whom an extreme cult had formed within its own limited radius, forged out of tears, sweat, bruises, scars on the heart. The foot soldiers of this small army found themselves screaming and pouring their souls out, packed into bunker-like clubs on the outskirts of town, in an environment utterly removed from any hint of media interest. And yet, seemingly invisible, they represented the rawest, most honest face of their generation; after all, the much-reviled emo-pop fad of those years, farcical as its drift became, had clearly pointed to the mood of the times, in a way prising open a Pandora's box.

What was needed, though, was a manifesto that could break beyond the blackened walls of those basements, that could carry the story of that raw, visceral pain outside the scene in its strictest sense. Something to explain that emo isn't what you've been told it is, but, hey, this is a serious story, and it concerns you too. Yes, you, the one who at twenty was throwing punches at thin air.

This is where Fine Before You Came's "Sfortuna" comes in (also credited as "S f o r t u n a"). The album that rises to become the definitive manifesto of Italian emocore, but also a watershed – more in retrospect than as a driver of evolution. "Sfortuna", while giving the genre renewed visibility, doesn't actually chart a new course for a genre that had, in truth, already said almost everything it had to say; rather, it's its definitive landing point, a simulacrum summing up its whole meaning, carrying that imagery to an audience that was certainly not "mass", but no longer confined within itself. In doing so, it shows how – probably – emo was, in a broader sense, the true great missed opportunity (helped along by a certain stigma stemming from its mainstream mystification) of the independent scene; the attitude that, perhaps, at a moment that was otherwise fairly static for the rest of the alternative world, could have told the story of those years better than anything else. The story of a generation raised believing it was born a failure, yet pained to admit it; a generation that calls its failures bad luck, curses that luck, only to realize it's cursing only itself.

The man who pulls this gem out of the ghetto of DIY labels and tiny specialist imprints is none other than Enrico Molteni, who welcomes Fine Before You Came into the arms of La Tempesta. Lietti and co. had already released three albums in English, with Van Pelt serving as guiding lights (right from the choice of name); the switch to Italian feels like an epiphany, and Molteni doesn't think twice. He himself will later call "Sfortuna" one of the La Tempesta records he's proudest of.

The production is dry (you could almost call it vaguely "Albini-esque"), the meters are jagged and off-kilter, the cover is just some random photo of five random guys. So what makes "Sfortuna" so special, then? First of all, the fact that it isn't purely an emo record. Fine Before You Came fuse different languages together; post-hardcore and post-rock, emocore stretched and drawn out until it sounds at times like slowcore, and slowcore jittered up until it sounds at times like emocore.

Musically, then, this isn't simply a homegrown rehash of American Midwest or screamo templates; "Sfortuna" echoes with Fugazi, At The Drive-In, Slint, Codeine, territories the band will explore ever more widely as their discography progresses. An explosive blend, one whose synthesis feels far more personal than derivative; but it's not really the technical side that makes this album great. "Sfortuna" is a slap across the face, a kick in the stomach, or both at once. It grips your head and your limbs. It digs so deep into intimate scenarios that it transposes them into the universal. It makes you implode with guilt with no glimmer of indulgence or redemption, yet it opens up all the space needed to let out at least one cathartic scream.

The caustic, chilling march of "Lista" opens proceedings, thinning out into a kind of slowcore-on-steroids unease, its looping hypnosis broken after two minutes by Lietti's anguished, distant scream. "Buio/Appello" climbs back up into sharp, hammering hardcore rhythms, reproducing in sound and lyrics the cage of unresolved, unresolvable inner conflicts.

Don't be afraid of the dark

Better not to see than

To search in vain and find nothing

You can't sleep, you're thinking of me

So think of me as doing fine

With my new perpetual smile

With my holiday-like pace

And body lying still in the dark

All around here there's nothing but darkness

Darkness, all around here there's nothing but darkness

I'm not afraid of the dark

Better not to see than to try in vain to avoid

The ceiling, I've been waiting for hours for it to collapse on me

But don't kid yourself, there's no compensation

For what you've lost, for what you never had

("Buio/Appello")

It's the lyrics that represent the focal point of "Sfortuna" (and of all Fine Before You Came's work, in general); they're the load-bearing framework of the songs, their starting nucleus and driving engine, suggesting that the music is probably stitched around the words, rather than the other way round.

Thus "Fede" moves obliquely and dissonantly, exploding amid poignant choruses in a hermetic portrait of the ghosts of a love that's ended, spilling over into the drama of simple, everyday visions.

In your old house there now lives a couple with a child

he's a silent child

dressed as an adult, acting like an adult

[…]

I never dressed as an adult

("Fede")

This leads to the disillusioned emotional neurosis of "Natale/Cena" and the psychotic dance of "O è un cerchio che si chiude", obsessions screamed out from a heart torn apart, and to the more purely emocore moments of "Piovono Pietre" (with a faint whiff of early Get Up Kids) and, above all, the already-mentioned "Vixi", an unreserved condemnatory epitaph for the phobias and anxieties of millennials.

Beyond everything else, trying to judge "Sfortuna" from a critical standpoint is a completely pointless exercise. "Sfortuna" is one of those albums you can only feel burning on your skin. It's urgency and primal instinct, leaving no time for reflection or analysis. It's frightening in the way its spleen and its pathos run rampant. If you manage to grasp it, it becomes the record of your life. For this reason too, seen from a distance of over a decade, it remains a cornerstone of the contemporary Italian alternative scene. On one hand, it restores to the concept of emo the dignity it had unjustly lost, in a sense singing its requiem. Indeed, although in the wake of "Sfortuna" the bands of the Italian scene would go on to multiply exponentially in the following years (eventually consolidating a thriving screamo "school" appreciated abroad too), that world would nonetheless remain stuck in its own niche, with an identity-driven fervour that never faded, but for the most part with little new to add to the conversation (notwithstanding a vague revival trend that seems to have been developing in the past few years).

Fine Before You Came will remain the only band in Italy to have genuinely leapt over that fence; they will nonetheless retain a hardcore-orthodox approach, continuing to favour the live dimension and shunning the new paradigms of promotion and marketing (including a bare-minimum use of social media, which will eventually be abandoned altogether from a certain point onward), and will gradually shift the traits of their style, moving it more and more (especially after "By now") toward post-rock shores, probably the first to realize that the emocore season had reached its plateau.

More specifically, though, the importance of "Sfortuna" lies above all in its subterranean impact on the entire Italian indie culture then taking shape; the arrival of Fine Before You Came forces the whole new generation, whether they like it or not, to come to terms with emo. In doing so, looking back with hindsight, it tells us what we were, what we weren't, what we could have been.

One cannot ignore, though, how a certain kind of postmodern poetics of unease found in so-called contemporary Italian indie – including the pop-flavoured variants that developed from the 2010s onward – owes a debt of direct direct or indirect influence – sometimes openly acknowledged – to that narrative which "Sfortuna" crystallizes with an overflowing, piercing expressiveness, with a disarming alchemy of arid alienation and the urge to scream with fists raised to the sky, disgraced grace and abyssal power. So much so that, even today, "Sfortuna" manages to be genuinely current and still capable of striking new generations of listeners.

Over the years, Fine Before You Came will retain a cult status comparable to few other still-active bands, carrying on a career of rare artistic honesty, buoyed by a capacity for reinvention that will nonetheless never betray their own roots. With them we'll try to understand September and also more complex forms. But those are other stories. Meanwhile, many of us are still here, perhaps dressed as adults by now, listening and re-listening to that monument called "Sfortuna". Which keeps hurling all the debris of our lives back at us.

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20/11/2022