Things I remember from conversations with some musicians: a drummer told me that he played even while he slept, with relentless muscle spasms, beating perhaps new rhythms and that he wanted to record with a machine still to be invented. When the singer of News For Lulu explained to me what it meant to live in a city other than the band – he in London, they in Pavia – and communicate through demos, temporary files, temporary bases, telling each other from a distance the music that each of them was listening to , outside the rehearsal room, waiting for a new synthesis. In both cases I thought that you have to have the courage to lose the songs, that losing the songs also serves to free the bodies, the next day, or even years later.
Inside the single Rooms, that anticipates Ready for what, the fourth album by News For Lulu, there are both synthesis and loss: it is a song written by a band that found itself in the studio after many parallel conversations and private transformations, and makes lost sounds that are heard in the background the its strong point.
Sounds that belong to other times, to another California, to another dance floor deserted by anyone who does not feel comfortable with its uncoordinated melancholy. If there was a litmus test to measure the confidence a band can get from insisting on old-fashioned reasons, News For Lulu would somehow set it on fire, so radiant is their relaxed intensity. The same as those who can dance and dream on that floor, even if everyone has left it.
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