Kallax / Upwind – 15 April 2021
This is great! What else can I say!? It’s great!
Comrad is a little hard to describe, but their new album, Restiamo Vicini (let’s stay close) is amazing. There’s a definite Epitaph / Fat influence, but the band is really held together by vocalist Gio Sada. Damn, Sada has some pipes. I want to be in a band with this guy. He has this great aggressive slightly gritty tone, but he has a great voice, and my vibe is that he likely has some classical training. He won Italy’s X-Factor and released a solo single that went gold. Pair this with a really tight band and you have the five tracks that make up Restiamo Vicini.
But this band isn’t just an Italian pop star kind of dabbling with punk. Comrad has a really unique sound that should honestly be getting a ton of recognition. Part of what really makes this band stand out is its internationality. Discussions of regionalism in punk are often divided between east coast, west coast, and maybe midwest emo. But we often leave regional influences out of the discussion. Comrad’s members hail from a Italy, Canada, and Greece, and it sounds distinctly un-American, which is a breath of fresh air. We should all really commit to listening to music that isn’t from America, at least a little bit. BECAUSE, when you do, you get great bands like Comrad.
“Disfatta” is a really lean tune. It could be three or four times it’s length (it’s just under 80 seconds) but the band just…stops. They give you a little snack of a song and then it’s on to the next thing. But it’s great because nothing feels undeveloped. The third track, “Grande Salto” has a lot of unexpected twists and turns. It could be an ambient pop song but it turns into something more hardcore and then goes back almost immediately. It’s great. How many times in this review can I say that it’s great?
My only criticism of Restiamo Vicini is that it’s so short. It has five songs and it’s barely ten minutes long. I want more!
Musician and writer – I play in Cheap City and run Dollhouse Lightning
