#10 - bar italia - "Missus Morality" / "maddington" (tie)
Let the 2023 countdown begin!
I spent a lot of time listening to bar italia this year without really learning anything about the band or its songs. Some of that is by design—the vocals are often mumbled or buried in the brooding alt-rock mudslide, the themes orbit vague feelings and slices of slices of life. But I don’t need a Pitchfork interview or a Genius lyric analysis to grasp the spirit of this music. It hits with such potent feeling despite and because of its murky color and melted pulse. It’s a symphony of the sallow, a tour de force in shy melodies and gently beating, entrancing grooves. The way the three members rotate their vocals, sometimes harmonizing in contrasting tones like a human shadowed by a gloomy second self, makes me imagine friends rendezvousing on a dark street corner, trading stories and comforting each other after a peculiar night out. Sometimes when I listen to bar italia riding the bus late or walking across the bridge in the rain, the songs lodge themselves so deeply in the rhythm of my thoughts I almost forget I’m listening to music.
After teasing you with tepid chords, “Missus Morality” wigs out into a whirling freefall. Nina Cristante exhorts you to “give up your dreams and come this way,” and it feels less like a command to be jaded than an invitation to enter into a lovely private secret. The equally cathartic “maddington” weaves sparkling violin into the attic-dusty instrumentation. It sounds like a long-enervated sad sack discovering happiness again, a gray existence letting light spill in.