On a November Saturday, Glasgow’s indie kids flocked to Room 2 to see bar italia, the UK’s favorite up and coming post-punk darling. Descending the stairs to the dimly lit basement, The Velvet Underground was oozed from the speakers. As people trickled in, the opener, Japan Review, a Shoegaze band from Glasgow who while decent, played to a less than full and less than excited room. Immediately after Japan Review left the stage, those who weren’t in line for the bar darted up the stairs for a quick reprieve from the subterranean room. Under the covered entry to the venue, clusters of uni students chain smoked and chattered in oversized thrifted leather jackets, before descending back down into the quickly filling basement. Other than a few seemingly out of place middle-aged men dotting the crowd, it was clear this show was almost exclusively students.
Having released an album the day before the show (the second of the year), the crowd didn’t all know what to expect from the setlist. Despite the prolific songwriting of bar italia, their albums never seem to feel rushed or slapped together. It is perhaps this constant stream of creative competency, along with their notoriously mysterious veneer that has turned them into the music world’s 2023 hyperfixation.
Bar italia took the stage but were in no rush to get started. For the next ten minutes or so the band tuned instruments, playing a few bars from time to time before suddenly launching into their set for real. None of the puttering around seemed to bother anyone, least of all the band, because that’s the thing about bar italia: they’re cool. They don’t address the crowd or explain themselves; they manage to make the plain, high school theater-esq blue backdrop feel ironic. While Nina Cristante stood center in all black and a slicked back bun, Jezmi Fehmi lingered to the left with cartoonishly large glasses and a skinny tie as Sam Fenton played opposite, donning large sunglasses. As the show began and Cristante swayed from side to side, occasionally playing the tambourine it became hard to tell if the band knew how hyper-stylized they looked or if they sensed they were bordering on try-hard territory. Every song they played the line blurred further: were they just Art kids leaning too hard on a 90s affectation of quirky, chic detachment or were they making a stylistic and self-aware choice to present pretentious — either way the crowd devoured it.
Although the performance was nothing groundbreaking, bar italia somehow manages to put you inside the songs. Even as Cristante was drowned out by the other instruments more than a few times throughout the show, it all fit into place. In the laid back, head bobbing crowd each detail aligned with the intended aesthetic. It was relaxed but curated, everyone was invested but nobody too keen on showing it — slight nodding, foot tapping, and the occasional whistle or woop between songs were preferred by this crowd. In the hazy world of the basement, songs blended together and time lengthened. In a truly unprecedented turn of events, nobody’s phones were glued in the air; it wouldn’t look very cool to take a video and this is a cool band after all. This distorted sub-reality is where the power of bar italia lies. No matter how disorienting or uncertain of a world they built, they pull you in — you get to be part of it all, at least in the basement.