Pocket Chestnut
Bedroom Rock ‘n’ Roll
7/10
_______________
You’ll like it if
– You have a passion for soft rock
– You used to do tape trading and record your music at home
If an album is entitled ‘Bedroom Rock’n’Roll’, tthe least you can expect is some intimate folk, blending in country and rock. Pocket Chestnut wink at the 90s soft rock with linear melodies, beating drums and a frequent interaction between guitar and bass. The album is therefore satisfying our expectations, providing quick sketches of a tradition that never stops living in the mind of the ones who feel it under their skin. The band is introducing Italian traditions, using as a medium the Nashville one, in a really perfectly done matching that does not disappoint the listener.
Ballads (or pseudo-ballads) are the core of the album, shifting from Memory House’s atmospheres (thanks to some random female vocals) and Golden Leaves country-folk (‘Nowhereville’, ‘Get Back Idea’, ‘No Time For a Good-Bye’). The same idea creates the basis of ‘Mind, Shuffled!’, even if electric guitar is alternating the acoustic one, hinting an hybrid implication, which is coming next. After the quite ironic lyrics “I play bathroom rock and roll” (‘Mind, Shuffled!’), like Dylan in 1966 at Royal Albert, the sound gets more country rock in its tunes, more scratched and distorted, bursting with some new energy (‘Seems To Me’, ‘Eternal Love?’). This energy is called pure rock and roll, and it’ll be back in the bluesy piano of ‘Railroad Walking’.
Jumping from a Belle and Sebastian male/female interaction (‘Seem to Me’) to some Moldy Peaches and Anty Pats-esque tracks, Pocket Chestnut give us exactly what it promised, a bunch of tracks you can listen in your bedroom, connected to an old walkman with a tape in your hands.
