This Italian crew create wonderfully unorthodox hardcore on their second album!
Don’t get us wrong – we love it when bands do a great job of channelling the sound of classic punk and hardcore, but ultimately both genres were founded on the spirit of rule-breaking. We’ve never before encountered such a band that sings in their native Italian, so hats off to Milan quintet Aurevoir Sòfia for thumbing their noses at the largely English-language world of hardcore to do exactly that. Well, for most of this record, anyway.
Certainly, ‘Scuola Sòfia’ is good enough to make me wish I’d tried harder with Italian, during my all-too-brief attempt at Duolingo lessons (during the Covid lockdown). It’s a very expressive language, so it suits the music well. The record begins with the title’s track’s air-raid siren of a guitar line, before a gloriously bouncy stop-start riff (think along the lines of ‘Holiday’ by Turnstile) kicks in. An explosive start, for sure.
Indeed, Aurevoir Sòfia share the Baltimore crew’s love of musical experimentation; why not drop a short piano interlude in the middle of a straight-up hardcore punk belter, as they do in ‘Ho Scritto Una Lettera’? Why not adopt a kind of spoken-word style on ‘Comunque Lo Stesso’, which builds gradually from a Cure-esque melodic intro into a noise-laden lament? And as for the acoustic guitar at the start of ‘27’….oooh, you can see the hardcore purists’ faces turning red in your mind’s eye. Hey, it’s their loss.
That said, these guys can rage with the best of them. ‘Copiedicopie’ sees them sounding irritable and restless over barbed-wire guitars and a refrain surely designed to whip any self-respecting pit into action, whilst ‘Cadillac II’ sweeps all before it with some seriously fuzzed-up bass and vocalist Luca D’Aniello sounding increasingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Even these aren’t without a few interesting twists, though – you’re never quite sure what the band are going to do next, even within the space of one track, and therein lies much of their appeal.
Overall ‘Scuola Sòfia’ is far too good to be pigeonholed as some kind of musical curiosity; it’s as good a hardcore record as you’re likely to hear all year, made by a band who don’t let their reverence for the genre stop them from putting their own stamp on it. Grazie, gentlemen – and apologies in advance for mangling your mother tongue as we (attempt to) yell along at your gigs.
‘Scuola Sòfia’ is out now via Kick & Snare Productions – check it out via the links below.
- Scuola Sòfia
- Ho Scritto Una Lettera
- Copiedicopie
- Comunque Lo Stesso
- Anything
- Cadillac II
- Senza Far Rumore
- 27
- Prima Di Tornare A Casa
Main Photo Credit: EMANUELA GIURANO
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I spend my days teaching English to foreign students, and my evenings attending as many gigs as possible. Raised mainly on a diet of 90s third-wave punk, my tastes have grown to include just about anything from trad ska to thrash metal. The Ramones are my musical gods.
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