REVIEW
Young bands that prefer 80’s aesthetics, synth pop, new wave, and that are certainly aware that the times and the instruments are now very different, are preparing to rework the most heterogeneous, chaotic and crazy sound material of all the times, looking for new ways to dazzle us and disorient our listening, while making everyone happy, just as it was in the spirit of the time.
The 100 Fables lead this process first by giving an answer to a question, which seems to resurface from the mists of time: “Are Friends Electric?” Asked hieratic Gary Numan; connected, it seems, to the same current cables comes the answer from Glasgow of our days: “We Are Electric Girls And Boys“, dry and not too condescending, with the right dose between sensationalism and emotional charge.
“Pressure” enters the scene, putting together the Japan of “Adolescent Sex”, but also the Rockets of “Galactica”; “Joy” jumps to the 90s of Gwen Stefani and her No Doubt, who were at that time already protagonists of an excursus in the sound of the previous decade with skill and taste, just like Shirley Manson and her Garbage.
“Electric Girls And Boys” plays on the same playground of this album’snincipit, but in “Untold” it is a tearful synth – that reminds us of the intro of “The Sandman” by their remarkable fellow citizen Alan Rankine – to introduce Lindsay Liora’s love affairs, all to remind us that this music should not be listened to, it should be felt to the end.
At the end of the listening we are left with a feeling of incompleteness, something escapes the balance of our feelings, as it is in the narration of our history backwards, up to about 30 years ago: a puzzle that is always missing a piece to be complete.
it will be 100 Fables’s job to keep telling us from now on the hundredth fairy tale, a thousand and one nights of sounds and words that will have to escape, for many moons, the inflexible judgment of time.
Nando Dorelassi
LINKS
