I'm sure many of you non Italian readers don't know that much about Bachi da Pietra for the simple fact except for the music they sing, think, breath in Italian or at the least the way Italian should be, but I'll explain it later, said that they've been featured with a track in the soundtrack of the tv series "Son Of Anarchy" with Henry Rollins therefore power to them!. This project involved mainly the band, a sound engineer Francesco Donadello and a video maker Luigi Conte. For what concern the live vinyl and the audio exhibit of the project it's recorded in analog in a theater and sounds damn good, if you don't know the band, despite the live sound profile the characteristic skeletal-acoustic blues, post-eighties noise rock, theatrical reading mixture comes out vividly. If you need names to get a picture of if you put together Rowland S. Howard, Nick Cave, Massimo Volume, Thalia Zadek's Come and why not a little bit of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, some depression and the game is done. As I've said the live vinyl is great but I still think the most interesting part of the project is the live video since it freezes in time the whole atmosphere and the basic idea of the concept. The confidential feel of the live performance, the "back to analog" profile of the recording and the "making of" that lays behind this double format release come out more clearly than a thousand review could illustrate. The fourth album of the band is about to be released and we're talking about one of the most well known duos of the italian undergound scene featuring former ex singer of Madrigali Magri and Bruno Dorella who's the man behind Bar La Muerte and current member of Ovo and Ronin.

The ghostly darkness evoked by the fourth release of the White Rose Transmission, a project where the glittering creative wit and whimsical poetry by Carlo Von Putten (member of Dead Guitars) and Adrian Borland, the late lamented soul of The Sound whose warm shadow's still casted onto this band's music, on the occasion supported by the musical skills by ex-Clan of Xymox lyricist Frank Weyzig and Rob Keijzer, is able to haunt listener's ear just like a web crafted by an expert spider. Sad acoustic rock ballads whose firing melodic lines are augmented and fed by melancholic feelings and lofty sentiments, emerging from lyrics, which even if don't really reach the peaks and the spiritual highlands discovered by Adrian, sound fully inspired and sometimes look like Adrian's thoughts and dialogues between his soul and the spider biting his mind since the introductory Love or just Loveless ('¦words like 'This everlasting fire/Came down with you my friend/I saw the lights of heaven/Before I saw the end ' sound like a grateful farewell to all the musicians, artists and common people who had get in touch with Adrian's soul'¦) and Wildest Horse ' maybe the best song of this album together with the moving Glittering Green. That's the reason why even the circumstance that the velvety Carlo's voice seems wallowing in pain and depression and the fact that sometimes lyrics insist considerably on some clichés of the genre makes sense and looks like a sort of reunion with Adrian's soul. Intense guitar lines are enriched by piano touches and backing vocals, both of them being elements highlighting the pathos of the whole album and I can easily imagine Adrian's nodding at these guys when he magically reappears in Foreign Land, an edited and re-arranged version of Love Is Such A Foreign Land, a track issued on Adrian's last somewhat prophetical album The Last Days Of The Rain Machine. It's like he lives again'¦

Father Murphy were an indie folk band from Italy, now while the years have passed by, the transition is complete, they gradually passed from playing a good and essential American indie rock with reminiscences of Violent Femmes to this dark mixture of lo-fi rock and crepuscular psychedelia. Strange kind of blend as you can imagine and you have to consider they have some really chaotic experimental interludes in the middle of the song that bring you down in this spectral Seventies' atmosphere which characterizes the whole productions. What did they do to complete this metamorphosis? They worked so much on the shape of their sound, they add more reverb, more acoustic noises (bells and cowbells for examples), they reduced structures and some riffs to the minimum it took to give the shape to a song and they painted the whole canvas of black melodies. Sometimes it also of the darkest Doors, Sonics and Stooges amputated of their rock element and obscured by a black cloud. I think if I say it has a strange "garage" aura many may think to garage rock, but it's closer to some of these bands when following some bad trip it's not even that far from some nightly Fuzztones ballads. Sure despite the aesthetic is easy to perceive this band is not just a clone of heroes from the past, but sure they follow the ranks of vintage music. Believe me, they were a really good band but I would have never imagined they could take such a direction. A really nice surprise.

Behind the emaciated appearance, the deathly pallor of his skinny face contrasting with spite of the deep bags under a pair of raven eyes of the talented Austrian musician and singer (luckily he's not another emulation of HIM way of singing, which seems to be almost an habit or a trend in the contemporary gothic and dark-wave scene'¦) Stephan Sutor, it's not hidden only a vampirish identity crisis or the teeny fancies of a rock-pop star wannabes, but above all a talented musician with a certain borderline poetical wit. According to the lyrics of the little spoken word track Picturesque and Beautiful ' which has been previously issued in a collection of poems entitled Borderline ' die andere Art zu fühlen (transl.Bordline, the other way of feeling), the poetical side of Stephan could be depicted by using his own words as '['¦] a wicked mind/a broken heart all that is mine/all picturesque, all beautiful/put on the mask'¦['¦] ', a clear-cut brush work which could explain the general mood between gothic imaginary and a dark emotive world between borderline feelings and decadent perceptions, seeping from the words of the eccentric entreaty of the very first song, Vampire. From the musical viewpoint the song which I just mentioned could be not the best way to start as it looks too anchored to something already heard, but the poor estivation is highly counterbalanced by the energy and the good song performance of Walking On Air and I Am You, the last of which being my personal favorite even if it seems to be a pop-tinged melting pot of Placebo, Rasmus (maybe for his kind of moaning-like rush on the distorted punkey guitar line) and Sonic Youth, a track which together to other ones such as the darkish lyrical and musical playset of Blow My Mind (a good vocal interpretation of lyrics with some nice rhetorical tricks such as the oxymora 'I wanna blow my mind in pieces/I wanna burn 'till it freezes' intertwines with an enjoyable electronic sliding solid gothic-rock structure) or the following one Losing Control (it's really moving the way Stephen interprets it by inserting some meows partially reminding the ones by Brian Molko) could be fitted to climb charts, an aim which could be arguably reached if he keeps on walking on this stylistic path enriching his discography and refining its style in order to obtain a more personal one by purifying it from the most recognizable influences. In the meanwhile, all gothic rock lovers are alerted: this Austrian ghostly entity is prowling through the scene and looking for bloody music lovers and lost souls in the thick wood of audiences.

We already had the chance to check the female duo Kim Ki O (which means "who is that anyway?" in Turkish) on the "Radio Resistencia" CD compilation but DANS is a good way to get deeper into their sound. Ekin Sanaç (synths, keys, vocals, beats) and Berna Göl (bass, vocals, beats) for their official debut packed six tracks sung in Turkish which sound in balance from melancholic and cold atmospheres. Synth sounds along with a pulsating bass guitar usually are the core structure of the song where basic drum beats and dreamy vocals paint the emotions of two girls which are living into and Middle Eastern metropolis. Tracks like the instrumental opening "27.01 Berlin" and the following "Herkes evine" are pop but also hypnotic and it's like listening to New Order playing melancholic minimal wave into a bedroom.