{"id":218217,"date":"2025-10-16T21:13:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T21:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/218217\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T21:13:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T21:13:07","slug":"bar-italia-some-like-it-hot-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/218217\/","title":{"rendered":"Bar Italia ‘Some Like It Hot’ Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBar Italia<\/a> 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 \u2014 one of the year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tBar Italia are definitely not shy about showing off their moody rock influences \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis 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\u2019re playing live, blinking uneasily in the spotlight, yet graduating to festivals and U.S. tours, while remaining their own hilariously pretentious selves. (\u201cI\u2019m interested in the cultural phenomenon of bands but I don\u2019t like any music,\u201d Fehmi declared<\/a> last year. \u201cI don\u2019t even like our music.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n\tSome Like It Hot is named after the classic Billy Wilder film about three road musicians \u2014 Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon \u2014 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\u2019re conveying lust or despair or yearning. All three clearly share the belief that the pinnacle of the vocal arts is Robert Smith mumbling \u201cMust\u2019ve been asleep for daaaays,\u201d and honestly, who\u2019s to say they\u2019re wrong? (On one of their early records, they start crooning \u201cBoys Don\u2019t Cry\u201d in the middle of a somber instrumental, and it fits right in.)<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Bar Italia look for glimmers of beauty in everyday boredom, from the acoustic waltz of \u201cBad Reputation\u201d to the sideways rock lurch of \u201cOmni Eyebrows\u201d and \u201cEyepatch.\u201d The songs tend to be three different love stories, with overlapping narrators stepping on each other\u2019s toes. \u201cCowabella\u201d serenades an obscure object of desire viewed from different angles \u2014 but never really seen. \u201cRooster\u201d is a a late-night connection where the wires get crossed, as Fenton yelps, \u201cYou can\u2019t forget about a target you missed \/ I was lost to the world from the moment we kissed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMarble Arch\u201d is a top-shelf vignette of metropolitan angst, bristling with mod guitar chime. \u201cRain in London Town, it reflects all the feelings of people around,\u201d 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, \u201cWhat are you doing in my head again? \/ You don\u2019t belong here, you never did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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\u2019s-get-lost guitar attack of \u201cI Make My Own Dust,\u201d with Cristante yowling \u201cborrowed, stolen, from someone, anyone!,\u201d over the accelerating groove. Wherever Bar Italia want to go from here, it\u2019ll be worth following.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bar Italia rose out of the London rock underground with their own seductive guitar buzz, three criminally cool…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[105328,49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-218217","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-bar-italia","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}