Kairo
Medioemo

In May 2016, Teens of Denial by Car Seat Headrest was released in the States. This album highlights Will Toledo as a great pioneer of lo-fi, with ten albums to his credit at just 23 years old. This is not the place to celebrate this young genius, but his skill in using words (as there's a real study behind his lyrics) came to mind while listening to Medioemo by Kairo. Obviously, with all the necessary differences between a young man from Campania and a young man from Virginia.

Kairo, active since 2011 with a self-titled EP, continued in 2014 with 13. Two albums that offer an old-school emo punk, which didn't bring anything essentially new but, thanks to their freshness, carved out a fairly important place in the Italian music undergrowth for this trio from Campania. With Medioemo, Kairo proposes a revival that winks at American Football and all the twinkle bands inspired by them. In one track, we even hear the Wurlitzer, an instrument to which American Football will dedicate a song.

The lyrics are a separate matter. If Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest stood out for the use of a meta-literary and meta-musical language, Kairo stands out for a sometimes excessive but very peculiar lyricism. Peculiar because the source of inspiration is none other than the Vate of Italian poetry, D'Annunzio. I think a word like "diafane" has very few occurrences in Italian pop music and obviously, there are no occurrences for "ancipite." "D'io," where we find the word in question, is a tribute both to D'Annunzio with a revival of the superman theme and to Husker Du.

So, among more cultured citations, we also have pop references, like in the beautiful title track where the line "Our band could be your life" appears, a line from the Minutemen, champions of the DIY philosophy. The piece is a celebration of this scene and of music in general as a cathartic tool. "Ad un deserto" starts quietly with reminiscences of a certain Italian singer-songwriter indie rock of the '90s, then explodes in a finale more fitting to the album, reminiscent of Algernon Cadwallader.

Honorable mention to the fantastic sax in "Il senso della fine," which takes the place of the trumpet that the good Steve Lamos played in the debut of American Football. Kairo has developed a strong self-awareness, delivering a little gem of the Italian revival scene, which too often is stagnant and without original solutions.