The Shadow Line
Fast Century

Florence, late November, I went to the Viper that night to see Slut in concert at the Alter Nite event.

Few people, the opening band starts playing, they are Italian but sing in English, surely if they had started the concert with a shy "Hello" disguising their origins, they would have attracted more attention than a simple "Buonasera".

Just 25 minutes are enough to convince me to buy the CD at the end of the evening. Not that it lasts much longer than their live performance (not even 40 minutes of album for 11 tracks) but this CD I have in my hands, "Fast Century", by Shadow Line, a band from Rome which from the canonical Myspace I learn has been around since 2002, is a concentrate of songs, all potential hits, ideally covering the many facets of indie music, from a more garage punk attitude with songs featuring pounding endings and rhodes (like "Commercial" 2 minutes and 30 of heavy guitars and riffs), to a weakness for the '80s new wave ("Erasing Mind" with crossed guitars and a finale with liquid sounds) up to a healthy radio friendly attitude as in "Untitled" or "God Save my Soul" opening and closing tracks of the album.

Editors, Bloc Party, Kings of Leon, reminiscences of '90s Britpop bands, but also healthy episodes of rock'n'roll and a curious track with western sounds (I’m talking about "Ordinary Face") and it's a pleasure to find a band that is basically inspired by the English indie rock movement (which lately certainly isn’t producing phenomena but rather quite irritating bands of kids offering song-copies one after another) but which offers an eclectic work, with depth and personality, composed of songs all excellently written and produced (by the way, I discovered on the record label's Myspace that they share the same producer as My Awesome Mixtape, another Italian artist who has managed to earn success both at home and abroad).

So, the moral is always the same: if they had been born in the UK we’d all be arguing on forums about the deserved/undeserved success of Shadow Line, but instead at concerts, we prefer to take advantage of the opening band to line up at the bar for a beer. Beyond my judgment, which is excellent, I just hope to have done a bit of justice to this band for the concert that night.