PLASTIC MADE SOFA - Whining Drums

Start with "We're Just Changing" and you already get the drift. Keep listening, "Lizards On The Wire", the Manchester-flavored britannia full of winks and accents, with guitar and bass that feel like the real deal, something that actually "sounds"; "Midnight In Remada", the Tunisian, Eastern-tinged sensation of having touched freshly tanned skin, that smell of wind and desert stars.

Plastic Made Sofa are currently the Italian act closest to those psych-brit sensations: the echoes of the five-piece from Bergamo and the stretched-out voice of Andrea Rota, a frontman with real compositional chops and danceable pop melodies in the vein of Gallagher, of Ashcroft, not forgetting Robert Harvey (The Music).

The band, formed several years ago and brought back into the spotlight in 2010 with their debut album "Charlie's Bondage Club" - which earned them a slot at that year's Heineken Jammin' Festival (the last time Pearl Jam played in Italy) - took their time returning to the scene, but did so with care and assurance, delivering a second record - "Whining Drums", released in late 2013 - of excellent quality, worthy of a tour that doesn't stop only at our peninsula's borders (they'd make an ideal opening act for the brit band of the moment, Temples).

The shifts of the last three years have led them to follow the scents carried by the great air masses: neo-psychedelia is the underlying foundation, even if well disguised beneath a snarling sound and rhythmic jabs that leave plenty of room for interpretation, but which inevitably point back to the common denominator of that raw, grimy rock of the late Seventies, of a reborn Neil Young and his Crazy Horses on "Rust Never Sleeps".

All of this on a rainbow blackboard where the teachers in the classroom are Messrs. McCartney and Lennon, in the ballad "Try To Be A Woman", in the Indian-flavored "Needles For Breakfast" and across the record as a whole: a lesson already preached a few years back by Campania's own A Toys Orchestra.

Quality in this quartet from the Bergamo area, but not only that: there's the typical concreteness and substance that those territories carry with them, the pursuit of the goal without too many frills (here lies the most significant parallel between Uk and Bg), the simplicity of concept, the squared-off content, the immediacy of communication.

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30/01/2014