Afterhours
Ballate Per Piccole Iene

I hope you'll forgive me for reviewing this album for the eighth time... the only justification I can give is that "Ballate" is the album that introduced me to Afterhours and consequently my favorite...

At the beginning of the summer, I had just started to get acquainted with Italian rock (Vanadium, Litfiba, Marlene Kuntz, Linea 77...), when a friend's cousin said the brilliant phrase "why don't you listen to Afterhours?" Since advice is always welcome, I managed to get "Ballate Per Piccole Iene," "Germi," and "Quello Che Non C'è," and naturally, I didn't know that the ones I had among the other CDs were true masterpieces... I chose to listen to Ballate first (the title seemed rather silly and meaningless), so I put it in the player, and from that day my life changed...

The first two tracks, "La Sottile Linea Bianca" and "Ballata Per La Mia Piccola Iena," are absurd; I struggled a lot to understand Manuel's convoluted yet brilliant words in the first, but I was struck by the... "thing" that he himself does with the guitar towards the end of the song; in the second, I appreciated Manuel's desperate voice declaring prophetic phrases like "Love makes you lonely but it's much more painful if you're no longer dangerous to enemies and friends" or "The head is so full, you can't even think that even without you one can still breathe"... after the first two songs, I was already amazed by the Milanese's skill and dazed by that crucible of emotions that I had rarely experienced with music... so a break was needed with "E' La Fine La Più Importante," which I've also seen live, and it really works well for the power of the drums, but back then it said little to me, and even today it doesn't do much... "Ci Sono Molti Modi" is a haunting, beautiful yet dark song, with moments that stir up immense rage ("and to feel alive... I'll kill you...") and with a chorus that brings tears to your eyes ("you'll see if my love is a pathology, I'll know how to eradicate it"); completely different feelings with "La Vedova Bianca," an energetic, sunny, powerful song performed instrumentally very well... when you hear it you can't stand still; I've learned to appreciate "Male In Polvere" only recently, the first time I heard it, it seemed boring and predictable... now I've reassessed it, but I still think it's the worst... oops... less beautiful after "E' La Fine La Più Importante"; "Carne Fresca" continues enjoyably until the end when Manuel comes up with another crazy thing with the moaning and screaming for mercy guitar that really leaves you speechless. In "Chissà Com'è," the combination of the violin with the fast rhythm of the song is cute; when "Il Sangue Di Giuda" starts, I thought "here, this is a masterpiece!", the words Manuel says at the beginning accompanied by the piano only serve as a prelude to the spectacular explosion of the chorus that gets inside you and breaks down any wall embedding itself within you in every crevice, unable to ever come out... "Il Compleanno Di Andrea" is the conclusion of this album... it leaves a bitter taste when it ends, and the CD stops in the player... even though I think at this point no song can make you feel satisfied after such a beautiful album!

When the CD finished, I lay on the bed not understanding anything for a good 5 minutes, mingling the words of all the songs I had heard... since then, I've become passionate about Afterhours, and in them, I've discovered the best Italian band, which NEVER sold out for money, NEVER made disappointing records, and NEVER stopped satisfying us Agnello fans... Few other bands have made me feel what I feel today listening to their records... I say it even now that my musical knowledge is much broader, and I'll always say it... Afterhours are the best...

"And you tell yourself it'll be fine if you have pride for your nothingness... don't lie to yourself with yourself" (Male In Polvere)