Jeff Rosenstock
No Dream

THE REVIEW

There isn't a moment to stop, it's now or never.

If there's one good thing that this COVID-19 has left us (which might also hide some pitfalls, to be rational, since the epidemic isn't over yet), it's a huge CARPE DIEM stamped on us.

Yesterday, returning from a pizza night with friends, my wife, my daughter, and I passed through the center of my city to get a granita.

It seemed like the evening of July 9, 2006, the last victory at the World Cup.

Inextricable traffic, a festive air that fills the heart with joy, of course, occasionally ruined by some masks, but almost always pulled down to the chin (the famous “cretini doppi” of De Luca), so, no problem..

Groups of people crowded in front of meeting points or bus stops.

A delight for the morale of a nation that MUST recover.

Arriving near the lemon kiosk by the seafront, not finding a spot, I stay in the car, waiting for my wife and daughter who went to buy the granitas.

I open YouTube on my phone, play this NO DREAM on Bit radio.

Now, I know that perhaps the album is about something completely different, that it's a protest album, but for me, it's the rhythm and especially the tempo (extremely sustained in the individual songs) that matter.

And then the bright sun in the sky that melts the countryside house with its heat, which I see on the (beautiful) cover, is the perfect symbol of this summer that is starting but also and above all of the melting, that I see around, of the tension accumulated in these months of forced quarantine.

It reminds me of the best Green Day, but also something of the Who in certain tracks (NO DREAM).. and also of Billy Bragg (State Line), my daughter will tell me he sings like Blink 182... but nobody's perfect.

Surely, they are all hyper-kinetic songs, extremely catchy but never trivial, just a stop and go between one song and another, just to catch a breath and start again immediately, because THE TIME IS NOW.

It took my wife and daughter 30 minutes to get two granitas, there was practically only one or two songs left to the end of the album.

There was a line at the kiosk..

A granita from the kiosk at the start of summer is just what we need, we have no more time, who cares about the line, we must do it now, because life is beautiful, as long as it lasts...