by David Wilikofsky
The Australian DIY scene has been incredibly fertile in the past few years. Bands like Parsnip, Possible Humans, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, and Low Life have all released stellar albums that found their way stateside. With Sogni and their previous album Amici, we should add Primo! to this list.
Primo!’s sound is a take on the shambolic post punk of bands like The Raincoats or Kleenex. The songs manage to sound elemental and raw in a way those bands mastered, but still hold surprises. A track like “1000 Words” exemplifies this perfectly; the song is propelled by an angular guitar riff. We keep returning to the chorus, the titular phrase sung in a singsong voice. The song, whose internal logic we think we understand, remains tightly coiled up until the last twenty seconds when it unexpectedly descends into chaotic saxophone squawks. Primo! use their core instrumentation of guitar, bass, drums and keyboards like this across the album, keeping the listener on their toes throughout.
Far from being a mere imitation of their influences, Primo!’s lyrical concerns ground them strongly in the present day. “Machine” takes on the modern workplace and the feeling of just being another cog in the machine. “Best and Fairest” asks the listener to contemplate what “makes a life worth living” by positing a series of questions. “Reverie”, the album closer, uses a slowly strummed guitar as its bedrock accented by flourishes of keyboards. It ends the album on a particularly pretty note, fading out into silence.
What Primo! do on this album sounds deceptively simple. Individually many of the instrumental parts sound primitive, yet taken as a whole they interlock and play off one another in complex ways. The songs add up to much more than just the sum of their parts. With Sogni, Primo! have given us a fresh, modern take on post punk that we’ll be spinning for years to come.