First Simon’s post on the excellent Witch and now this. That’s two Italo posts in two days! Madness.
Faces is much cheesier than Witch, and all the better for it in my opinion. There’s no getting away from the fact that the best Italo records are cheesy. They have a certain innocence to them which means that they can get away with being horrifically cheesy and still somehow manage to sound great.
Being an unashamed cheese-fest, Faces fits in to this camp. It’s a basically a brilliant pop record, but long enough to be called a disco record. The refrain is especially strong, with a stunning melody and really nice chords, and the dreamy vocal and simmering synths make you feel as if you’re being tickled all over with a thousand of soft feathers.
The record builds and builds to an orgy of explosively cheesy Italian ecstasy, and by the time I’m 5 minutes in I feel the need to strip to the waist and start sniffing poppers. Amazing stuff.
It’s a brilliant record (with great album artwork too) and has stood the test of time. It wouldn’t surprise me if I heard this as a new release on something like Italians do it Better.
Clio didn’t release much, and quite a bit of what she did was pretty awful. For some reason though her songs which were about body parts were the good ones. Eyes is also a corker and was recently re-issued by Clone Records. Go get it here.
