Chico Fellini

Chico Fellini

(Shangri-La)

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

The disc starts out with a nice dark drive, very clean, yet still pushing out at the edges with thick and well controlled noise. The vocals moving between Emily Hagihara’s stretched and strong movements to Christopher Dennison’s tight and melodic counterpoint tie themselves to the snake of guitar. Then the next song, “Electrolyte”, moves into a more moody PJ Harvey touched melodic flow, thinking along the lines of “To Bring You My Love”. Hypnotic, and ending with disconcerting bursts of seemingly random piano crashes, the song slides straight into some velvet dive touched cabaret blue jazz croon. It doesn’t stay down there, in the low lights, though, it moves up and out and crashes, explodes, pushes against some twisted Thom Yorke vocalized rock opera before falling, once again, into the red wine stained depths that the song came out of.

There are definite elements of that new no wave sound splitting out from between the round and crisp rhythms, hearing moments of teenage jesus and the jerks, talking heads, and into the newer with bits and bites that could feel comfortable seeping into a bloc party song, but the dynamic theatrics that come across in the songs push this band into a new realm of musical mining. Post-Dark-Cabaret-Punk? It’s not moving like, say, the Dresden Dolls, but there are ties in genres there, as well as some Cinematic Punk Burlesque swirls. Throw in some hints of the Sex Gang Children messing around with some Tom Waits stylings, and a sparkle of goth-glam.

The songs are solid, though, there are choruses and strong hits of a pop sense in the structure, which makes even the seductive gutter dances a little more accessible, in the way that a modern cinematic film noir experience can be, but with layers of sound playing where the visuals should be.