Hugo Race & The Fatalists
We Never Had Control

(can one start with an autobiographical note?)

Once upon a time in a gray city inhabited by shadows there was a tiny little place that, if you didn't specifically seek it out with a map, you couldn't find it even if you cried. One of those places where you know you'll find something dark, dusty, and underground. Or, at worst, a stabbing. This place was run by a truly grouchy and gruff guy. You could say anything to this Guy except that he was a fool from a musical standpoint, as he always managed to bring great musical delicacies to that spot immersed in the industrial zone of the city. One day, while the present goblin of manual labor was filling out paperwork for the Guy, he came to my table and asked, "Do you know Hugo Race?" I answered affirmatively, knowing him as the guitarist of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, why?. And the Guy gave a smile so oblique it would have evaporated an entire convent of nuns. From there, I understood that he had figured out everything about life. A few days later, the miracle happened, and Hugo Race and his Fatalists appeared before us, the place filled up like never before, and they flooded us with ash and disorderly drunkenness. There's no happy ending to this story, or maybe that's exactly it. That place no longer exists. Or rather, it exists but it's terrible. The Guy has moved on to other places. 

(okay, enough now)

Two years later Hugo Race returns to my ears. And he returns precisely with those Fatalists (who, for those who truly don't know, are Antonio Gramentieri and Diego Sapignoli, better known as Sacri Cuori, another little band that does my heart so much good, indeed) that I loved so much that evening. He returns with a new freaking album. Why so much foul language? Because it's a damn album. "We Never Had Control" is a tremendously gray album. But what am I saying? This album is a downright emotional ashtray. Race's voice, saturated with smoke, fits perfectly with the melancholic patterns woven by the fatalists. The whole thing seems to revolve around a decaying blues that, from time to time, takes on different shades. Where in "Dopefiends" it rapidly pairs with folk arpeggios regurgitated from the most debauched America, in "Ghostwriter” it becomes a sibling to Martin L. Gore's wave blues pulses (back in the cowboy hat days) and adds rascal vocal liquors of papà Tom (Waits) that mature urgently until transforming into the urgent razor blade-like guitars of "No Stereotypes", annihilating elsewhere in sad ballads of mud and dust, painful and inflammatory like the title track with its hiss hidden beneath Mr. Race's deep bass and the angelic (well, not too much, let's say an angel fallen into a swamp) voice of his daughter Violetta dragging toward an ending without a happy conclusion, like my story. Because ultimately it is true: we never had control.