Citay
Dream Get Together

Mea Culpa.

A bit like saying the Our Father, the Mea Culpa is one of the key moments of the mass. The moment when every good Catholic admits their faults before the Lord (obviously in 90% of cases, the typical thought of the mass participant is more or less “ok, you caught me with my pants down, so sorry. But if you hadn't caught me, no way would I be apologizing!”) Bar theology aside, my Catholic-communist upbringing often makes me fall into the fatal trap of mea culpa, that is, in hastily labeling music and bands, often due to a lack of time or desire for prolonged listening.

Not that many are needed to understand what “Dream Get Together” by Citay is made of. The coordinates lie at the crossroads between late '60s electrified folk and the incursions of early '70s burgeoning hard rock, all well illuminated by the California sun. In short, the usual retro stuff in which I habitually indulge, but in the previous Little Kingdom it had so shattered my patience that it made me preemptively eliminate them from my listening. A wrong move in light of this new album, a fresh example of how one can sound “old” in 2010, but without the stench of stale and obsolete. That is, not a calligraphic and sterile re-proposal of the past, but a sincere attempt to recreate bygone and perhaps lost atmospheres.

Eight tracks without major quality drops, excellently produced (commendation for the crystalline sound of the guitars between folk and Byrdsian jingle jangle), from the initial "Careful With That Hat" (which has little to do with Eugene of Pink Floyd memory), among percussion, fuzz leading the way and a sunny melody from a silly smile, passing through the acid folk reiterations of “Secret Breakfast” and the ballad-that-reminds-a-thousand-others (without that becoming a flaw) titled “Mirror Kisses”, up to the two peaks of the album, the 7 minutes of “Hunter”, between Hawkwind reminiscences in phaser, with a solo and final coda with celestial strings, and the gentle shoegaze folk (sorry for the jarring juxtaposition) of the cover of “Tugboat” by the Galaxie 500 placed in closure, the seal of an album that won't change the fate of today's music scene, but will bring a breath of fresh air and a lovely smile to those angry faces of yours (and mine).