Bar Italia rose out of the London rock underground with their own seductive guitar buzz, three criminally cool types at home in the dark. They made their big splash in 2023 with two ace albums for Matador, Tracey Denim and The Twits. But their terrific new Some Like It Hot is even cockier, steamier, more insistent — one of the year’s kickiest indie-rock thrillers. All three trade off deadpan boy/girl vocals: Jezmi Tarik Fehmi the desperately lovesick gasping-for-breath one, Sam Fenton the cleverly reserved one, Roman expat Nina Cristante the taunting chanteuse.
Bar Italia are definitely not shy about showing off their moody rock influences — a little Slowdive, a lot of the Cure, plenty of the Velvets and Spacemen 3 and Sonic Youth. All over Some Like It Hot, they mix up postpunk, Britpop, shoegaze, and psychedelia with their own melodramatic flair. They even named themselves after the Soho coffee bar that inspired a classic Pulp song.
This threesome could be a sitcom about a modern indie band: two London slacker guitar boys share a flat while working on their lo-fi project called (get this) Double Virgo. Then they notice their Italian upstairs neighbor can carry her own tune. When the pandemic locks them up together in 2020, all three musicians get serious about their new band, releasing home demos that build up a buzz worldwide. Before you know it, they’re playing live, blinking uneasily in the spotlight, yet graduating to festivals and U.S. tours, while remaining their own hilariously pretentious selves. (“I’m interested in the cultural phenomenon of bands but I don’t like any music,” Fehmi declared last year. “I don’t even like our music.”)
Some Like It Hot is named after the classic Billy Wilder film about three road musicians — Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon — who are all in their different ways Not What They Seem. You can hear why Bar Italia can relate. The vocals are impeccably languid, whether they’re conveying lust or despair or yearning. All three clearly share the belief that the pinnacle of the vocal arts is Robert Smith mumbling “Must’ve been asleep for daaaays,” and honestly, who’s to say they’re wrong? (On one of their early records, they start crooning “Boys Don’t Cry” in the middle of a somber instrumental, and it fits right in.)
But Bar Italia look for glimmers of beauty in everyday boredom, from the acoustic waltz of “Bad Reputation” to the sideways rock lurch of “Omni Eyebrows” and “Eyepatch.” The songs tend to be three different love stories, with overlapping narrators stepping on each other’s toes. “Cowabella” serenades an obscure object of desire viewed from different angles — but never really seen. “Rooster” is a a late-night connection where the wires get crossed, as Fenton yelps, “You can’t forget about a target you missed / I was lost to the world from the moment we kissed.”
“Marble Arch” is a top-shelf vignette of metropolitan angst, bristling with mod guitar chime. “Rain in London Town, it reflects all the feelings of people around,” Fenton sings, while Cristante chokes on her own tears. Everyone in the song is too wrapped up in their own private misery to notice anyone else, even in the climactic moment when their voices join to ask, “What are you doing in my head again? / You don’t belong here, you never did.”
The songs on Some Like It Hot sound detached on the surface, but unsettling beneath, loaded with emotional turmoil and sexual tension in the guitars. Best of all, the band rocks out in the sleek let’s-get-lost guitar attack of “I Make My Own Dust,” with Cristante yowling “borrowed, stolen, from someone, anyone!,” over the accelerating groove. Wherever Bar Italia want to go from here, it’ll be worth following.
