Jennifer Gentle
The Midnight Room

To listen to any album by Marco Fasolo & his group and fully enjoy it, you needed to close your eyes, and for this latest one, the same rule applies. It's no coincidence it's called The Midnight Room.

The first track reminds us of the atmospheres already explored in the beautiful Valende, but it's just a tribute; in fact, the album has a sound that's very much Jennifer Gentle yet also very much its own. There are almost indie-rock bursts; someone said it's the answer to the Klaxons' debut album. Get that out of your head. Here you find yourself in a moldy old wooden bar from the '30s where Alfa Alfa and friends sing with a red candle in hand, waiting for midnight. There's rock, strange, fresh but not so much, grotesque yet also dark, carefree and visionary. At a certain point, the bar gang sits down to give the stage to two live puppets who, holding black suspenders, dance a skewed tap dance, and hum tunes that make you tap the rhythm under the table and nod your heads. They start their show with the track that is the album’s single, Take My Hand. Then an anxious dance The Ferryman, which makes way for the enchanting Electric Princess, or the drunkard's ballad, whatever you want to call it, unsteady but very enjoyable. After these, the two little puppets disappear into the darkness, not so magically, because it seems after entertaining us, they are macabrely dismantled behind the scene. We can hear their wooden bones suffer under tight blows, and it hurts to hear it; we almost grew fond of those two. Granny House comes along - it makes us realize that was a vision, and now there's no trace of it except for the fumes produced by their performance. Come Closer brings us back down to earth, and the descent is almost Berlioz-like, rhythmic and delirious - yet very fascinating, a great track.

Thus, the album is more immediate than Valende, but not for this qualitatively inferior. Kudos to them and Sub Pop (Seattle) which led them toward such an interesting evolution. Marco Fasolo is always Marco Fasolo, his voice is unmistakable, and I always like it so much, as well as his DIY production, deserving of applause. AAA, the album is packaged like a 12" record (in every sense). Fully passed with flying colors.