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Rating: "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast." (Oscar Wilde)
The Brilliants At Breakfast is a band from Palermo (Alex Valenti: vocals and guitar; Leo Vetrano: guitar and xylophone; Giuseppe D'Angelo: bass and back vocals; Sergio Corrado: guitar; Mauro Cassarà: drums and back vocals) formed in 2007, which recently signed a 2-album contract with Paolo Messere's Seahorse Recordings (Ulan Bator). "Romy's Garden" is the first of the two.
The album opens with "Shame", an ideal starting point where some remnants of grunge worthy of the best Seattle still echo. "Perfect As Circle": a melancholic ballad, where an echo of help comes from the depths of a frozen well, a plea that seems to continue in a more distorted manner in "Blue Berry Sky". The cinematic "Jules & Jim" is one of the many clues that suggest to us that The Brilliants At Breakfast do not only draw upon Northern European post-rock bands, but do not hesitate to go further back (not too much) in time to reach the borders of shoegaze. With "The Flow" and "Portnoy's Complaint" we reach the central point of the album; the first track is a dark corridor, bordering on the macabre, with Leo Vetrano delicately going up and down the steps of a xylophone, the bass continuously taking us back to the '80s, while the singing becomes spoken for the first time and the melody transforms into malice. Yet anger turns into melancholy once again through the usual guitar chords ("In Heaven"). "O.L.S." is the post-rock (Mogwai, Explosion In The Sky, etc.) we were talking about above: from the duration (seven minutes, almost eight), to the arrangement... including the usual dynamic changes, while "The Island" brings us back to the early tracks, decidedly influenced by the more pop side of the Radiohead. The journey concludes with the track "Romy's Garden", where over nine minutes emphasize once and for all the stylistic profile and journey of this group. The track ends with a long guitar loop with which The Brilliants At Breakfast reminds us that it is not easy to leave Romy's garden, which is indeed a labyrinth, where the path is ALMOST never predictable.
The band from Palermo resumes, revisits, and re-proposes in its own way a genre (the most renowned post-rock) and contaminates it in a determined and courageous manner... often the chords repeat and seem to spin aimlessly in their own labyrinth, but perhaps all this is part of the game... The first step is encouraging. (2.5 which becomes 3 for trust)
Post-rock? More "rock" than "post"... and maybe it's better this way!
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