Zita Swoon
Live In Brescia, 30/10/2004

There is a recurring image this evening: it's the hypnotic gaze with which Stef Kamil Carlens seems to guide towards the audience the notes he has just shaped with his tender and incredible voice. It seems like that of a freak who lives all alone in a small room, and from there whispers his poetic sweetness, tells his bizarre ideas, and screams his desperate passions. This is if I close my eyes.
If I open them, I see SKC a meter away from me, on the stage of FreeMuzik in Brescia. A 34-year-old Belgian Peter Pan who designs his own clothes and who also designs (helped by the sick grin of Tom Pintens and the other Zita Swoon members) his own way of understanding music, modifying it from one record to another based on his mood and always shading it with avant-garde refinement.

This time it's "A Song About A Girls", and therefore the grey-red shades of a pop that is both experimental and retro at the same time.

The show starts with the French smiles of Individu Animal, moves on to the gentle desires of Hey You, Whatshadoing? and the subtle blues of Me & Josie On A Saturday Night.
Tom Pintens is perfect with the quirky sounds of his guitar; he uses them to rearrange older songs according to the new shades, seemingly far apart, like Hot Hotter Hottest, Circumstances, and Song For A Dead Singer, presented in a skeletal and intense version.
The first part closes with a crescendo of frenetic movements: the obsessions of Thinking About You All The Time, the madness of Pig Chase (Stef, his melodica and the disorder), the sensual cubism of Remember To Withhold ("I'm working really hard, I wanna hear her shout...!") and finally the double apnea of Disco! and People Can't Stand The Truth, with a crazed, shamanic SKC.

In the encore, the six Belgians turn introspective and offer me (in addition to the class of Ice Guitars, tense and creative) Our Daily Reminders and Tv Song, ancient jewels that need no rearrangements: they shine in their simplicity, hypnotic like Stef's gaze, fragile like his voice.

Let me exaggerate (because perhaps it's the only way to convey that thrill that never left my smile throughout the concert): the best concert, so far and for quite a while to come.