The World/Inferno Friendship Society
Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's Twentieth Century

Can a mad criminal have a tender heart and a beautiful smile to die for?

A round, full, sweet face, almost rubbery, as if it had just stepped out of a wax museum. This is the major characteristic of Peter Lorre, a great Austrian actor who had the luck, but it also unambiguously marked his role as a villain, to debut with Fritz Lang in "M - the Monster of Düsseldorf" (whose poster is mirrored in the artwork of this splendid work), and then continued to work with the major masters of the time, such as Hitchcock, John Huston, and Frank Capra.

The life of someone with a good face identified by many as a bad guy is the story told by "Addicted to Bad Ideas...", starting right from Lang's murderer pedophile, passing through his only daughter: Catharine, to finally tell us about his death, which occurred in '64 due to a heart attack.

An ambitious and original project, which turns the 11 tracks into an orchestral punk-rock work, with a splendid corollary made of saxophones and clarinets, enough to characterize its melodies. A true musical, produced by something that calling a band is quite reductive. The W/IFS are something more: an ensemble, a tribe, a true society of friends, which in its ten years of life and the alternating of countless musicians, has stabilized into the current eight members, including three women. Just as it is reductive to pigeonhole their sound into a single genre, which could be translated into "quantum music", an anarchic Ska of great quality, halfway between the cabaret of Gogol Bordello and the ingenious madness of Man Man, though in "I Just Make Faces" the memory immediately goes to the Manhattan Transfer (!).

Capable of live performances as magical as they are engaging, the charismatic frontman of the collective is named Jack Terricloth, a character truly "boozy" and almost legendary around New York, endowed with a great voice and interpretative sensitivity like few others.

Let yourself be captivated by their previous works as well (especially the penultimate one: Red-Eyed Soul) and if it really has to be, if unfortunately my fate was already written, I would want the face of my killer to resemble Peter Lorre.

Regards, Addison.