Samuel Katarro
Beach Party

THE REVIEW

Alberto Mariotti alias Samuel Katarro, from Pistoia, twenty-three years old, grows up on bread and new wave. He plays in some Tuscan underground bands then, for unknown reasons, gets fed up and abandons this path. He’s a restless outsider: he decides to pick up the acoustic guitar, to somehow let out the blues that’s in his veins, without denying the past.

But woe betides anyone who tells him he plays “blues”: the young Samuel does not accept these classifications. For him, music is just a means to sing about his discomfort. And in the end, if you think about it carefully, he has all the reasons in the world: punk, blues, and rock ultimately serve the same purpose.

His music is indeed a music of nerves. A voice and a guitar as ramshackle as Robert Johnson’s, without wanting to blaspheme, are his distinctive traits. A deliberately raucous, quirky, and dyslexic blues.

However, the offering is qualitatively opposite to his stage surname. This young Italian guy, who came out of nowhere, has the courage to take the Mississippi blues from eighty years ago and kick it into the present. Along the path traced by his acoustic guitar in this “Beach Party” hovers a schizophrenic atmosphere drawn by terribly out-of-tune pianos, undisciplined synths, and schizophrenic violins, worthy of the most hysterical new wave loved by Samuel. The cry of pain of an African American merges with the white new wave: it is this incredible paradox that Samuel Katarro has managed to put into music.

But don't expect the beach party of the title; this young prodigy sings, with a very naive and, at times, grotesque attitude, about terrible stories, worthy of the darkest Tim Burton. They range from the sick person on the brink of death imploring someone to take care of his turtle (“Terminally Illness Blues”), or the modern Christ who drags, along with the cross (“Com-passion”), his punk records and Nick Cave, or, again, the rock band shooting at the bleeding moon (“The Moonlight Murders Psychedelic Band”) to the sly guy who soundproofs a public toilet and turns it into a brothel (“There’s a Lady Inside the Cabin”).

In short, if that tan guy with the black goatee appeared to this Samuel Katarro, he must still have been quite in shape, without any white beard and customary paunch.

PS: Samuel Katarro's former bandmates dumped him to form a Dream Theater cover band. Moral of the story: sometimes they serve a purpose too.