If you were to blind test their songs, you would say they were remasterings of forgotten tapes from 1994 that had somehow got lost in the archives of an indie college radio buried deep in the American Midwest. As you may guess by the slight Italian colouring of Adele‘s impeccable English though, they come from the infinitely flat Northern Italy and are based in yellow-fogged Milan. They don’t have much to do with the mid-Nineties either, except those being the years they were born in. This space-time gap is of very little importance: they wear the influence of Built To Spill, Pavement and Modest Mouse genuinely, with pride, with no mystification. If we were lazy journalists, we would use the shared ownership of a vagina to link Adele‘s expressive and confident voice to Sleater-Kinney and Liz Phair‘s “Exile in Guyville” as well. The spirit of the Nineties is well and alive in their music, with its crafty songwriting, smudged, troubled but firm, and a strong sensitivity with no hint of schmaltz. Straight to the point, raw but somehow delicate, like electric guitars that turn acoustic or poetry that disguise itself as prose, Adele takes no prisoners, and she does that noiselessly. Read that directly in her eyes in the video for “Sonnet #4”, in which her emoting face commands the camera like she was a grunge Mina.
“Sonnet #4” is taken from the band’s debut album, “Silently. Quietly. Going Away.”, which came out earlier in 2015 via Bello Records, the first music label owned by a cat.
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