Over the last decade or so, france has launched air, phoenix and a whole host of chanteuses including the heavenly keren ann. sweden has given up komeda, the concretes and peter, bjorn and john. ever germany has the scorpions. (for better or worse.)
but italy — for centuries the most aesthetically minded nation in all of christendom — has never sent a decent rock band into international orbit.
i try to get into the reasons for this, as well as what some consider a renaissance, in this piece in today’s LATimes. it’s pegged to a weeklong festival, with most of the action this weekend, called (H)itweek LA.
my favorite of all the bands is calibro35, a group that reworks the soundtracks from old italian exploitation films from the 60s and 70. classically italian, but with irony and funk.
Photo credit: Calibro35