02/02/2010

By http://songbytoad.com

An english review for Comaneci

Comaneci – You a Lie Posted by Matthew in Reviews on 21 Jan 10 • 16 Comments »

This is something of a surprise find; a band from Ravenna in Italy named after a Romanian gymnast. They are nothing like the band called Comanechi who played in Edinburgh the other day either. Where that band were described by Nick from Sneaky Pete’s as “a tiny Japanese girl screaming and drumming plus a seven foot beanpole in a wooly sweater playing sabbath riffs across two amps”, this is a very still kind of indie-folk which wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

It’s based around the twin treats of Francesca Amati’s gorgeous vocal and Glauco Salvo’s barely-played-at-all electric guitar, giving it just a little of the mood of early Portishead, and maybe a touch of the likes of Mazzy Star as well. There are other elements added too – a tiny amount of picking on an acoustic guitar, a little banjo here and there, and I think I heard some cello at one point as well, but there’s really not very much of that, as the arrangements are kept to a bare minimum.

I have to confess I always admire groups with that sort of instrumentation at their disposal and who show the restraint to use it so very little. I was going to say that it seems to demonstrate a certain confidence, but then Comaneci are no raw debutants so I don’t want to be condescending. Their first self-released EP came in 2004, and they have since released another EP, and album and worked on a movie soundtrack, so they know what they’re doing by this stage.

A whole album of slowly teased electric guitar and thick, hypnotic female vocals could get a bit dull after a while, but this is where the extra instrumentation is so well deployed. It may barely be there, but it is used extremely cleverly to break through the prevailing atmosphere and subtly shift the feeling of the album at just the right times. It would be wrong to say that it changes the pace or texture of the music all that much, but it does give the album the variation it needs.

I went through a spell of hearing from plenty of groups from Italy I almost liked enough to post, a year or two ago, but I’ve not heard anything from there for a while now. There are maybe a couple of songs where the actual tune itself could do with a little more dynamism on this album, but for the most part I really like it – a very pleasant surprise indeed.