Bar Italia arrive at their third album in two years and, more than ever, they mean business. Born within Dean Blunt’s World Music orbit but now far beyond that sphere, Sam Fenton, Nina Cristante and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi use Some Like It Hot to show a band that keeps expanding its palette of themes and moods, with greater personality and distance from their once-overbearing influences.
Marble Arch sets up a kind of lounge-jazz theatre, as Pete Doherty might within their already eclectic alt-rock perimeter; the waltz of bad reputation wanders through the same streets of a London lost in time, then turns to the open countryside, brushing against folk before snapping back to the city. When the scratch is fully urban, the Sonic Youth spirit rushes in (Cowbella), and when the guitars go into overdrive (I Make My Own Dust), shoegaze becomes another tool in the hands of a trio now more measured and road-hardened, shaped by touring miles and stage hours.
The influences remain, but now they collide fruitfully across decades: the Cure (specifically the Head on the Door era) surface right away in Fundraiser, meeting the sharp-edged guitars of Franz Ferdinand, The Hives and company; the ’80s and 2000s coexist freely, and Cowbella—listen closely—slides in a distinctly Dandy Warhols-style riff. The production is crisp, the arrangements tighter: these songs no longer hide behind a veil of mystery or settle for recycling noise and indie-rock tropes, Kim Gordon and Pavement echoes (Rooster), or the well-worn desert rock of King Hannah (The Lady Vanishes).
The interplay between voices remains their strongest card: Cristante provides emotional depth, while Fenton and Fehmi oscillate between detachment and confession, with more understatement and a Thurston-Moore-like coolness. The writing, both poetic and visual, balances observation, interiority and irony, turning the three into film characters—each with their own version of the story.
Beneath the recurring theme of relationships as performance or screenplay, the self splinters and reality fractures: “I let myself die / More than once / Borrow, stolen / Borrow, stolen from someone, anyone” (I Make My Own Dust). The lyrics evoke false intimacy, emotional distance, urban disorientation, warped spirituality, toxic love, emotional symbolism, stream-of-consciousness, disappearance and dissolution (“I’m quiet and I run to the end of the end,” from The Lady Vanishes).
Some Like It Hot is a mosaic that reveals a band now fully in command of its expressive language. Not a masterpiece, but certainly the moment when Bar Italia stop sounding like a promise and become a certainty.