Fine Before You Came
S F O R T U N A

Cesare Pavese on the last page of his diary wrote that "the more the pain is determined and precise, the more the instinct of life struggles, and the idea of suicide falls." He would only add a line below to say that even he no longer believed it (but "it seemed easy, thinking about it"). His diary ended there. His troubled existence would end a week later in a hotel room in Rome, on a torrid August day frozen by that inevitable gesture of his.

But Pavese had already been defeated by bitterness and the impossibility of life for a sensitive and therefore vulnerable soul like his. Only by transposing that consideration into a less fatal context, one realizes that the statement cannot be anything but true. Pain heats the veins, always gives one more reason to live. Rock would never have existed if someone had never had a Blues to cry over. No one would have ever had something to say if no one had ever tasted the bitter flavor of defeat. Everything begins and ends with it.

It's not a casual parallelism that I'm about to make. The Fine Before You Came know it well. Kids from the gray and claustrophobic Milanese suburbs, used to shouting into a microphone to exorcise their demons. Born as an anonymous band that emulated the overseas emo-core melting pot, from Get Up Kids to Cap'n Jazz, the turning point for them comes with their fourth studio album, costing more tears and disappointments than money. Cars inexplicably broke down, cats suddenly fell ill, vans with all the equipment inside were stolen and then ended up under a train, and someone even got diabetes during the genesis of this album. It seemed that everything, at that moment, happened only and solely in their microcosm. The five of them don't make a living from music, and probably never will; screaming into a microphone remained the only way to exorcise their demons. It seemed impossible to release that album, and they had to redo everything from scratch several times. But - they will say, having overcome the obstacle - bad luck doesn't exist, but now "S F O R T U N A" exists (written in capital letters on the cover, to emphasize the concept) and they can only be happy about it. Only the Pain from a dream that seemed vanished kept them from giving up at the best moment.

"S F O R T U N A" - printed by Triste Records on vinyl; by Ammagar on cassette; by Tempesta on CD - can sound like only someone who felt their world collapse beneath their feet could sound. The late-adolescent spleen of the beginnings remains but converted into a novel of bitterness and disappointment. In the opening track "Lista", you'll feel like you're listening to Slint stripped of their frigid twilight of "Spiderland" and put at the service of emotions. And then it's all a stream of consciousness. "Buio" is the bitter realization of what it feels like to be immobile when the world keeps moving without any sense; "Fede" and "O è un cerchio che si chiude" talk about tumultuous love stories that ended with a surreal - almost picturesque - and disenchanted lyricism that makes them even more moving. The screams of "Piovono pietre" are another, yet another confirmation that this is music at the service of nerves. In "Natale" everything interweaves perfectly and then closes in a long psychedelic tail. "VIXI" is the final epitaph, the song that gives the most meaning to the album and the definitive outlet of all these tears: that "I called my failures Bad Luck", you will sing it thousands of times, just for its disarming universality.

"S F O R T U N A", 2009: bad luck has a new charm.