And I keep hitting re-peat-peat-peat-peat-peat-peat
- Selena Gomez
And that is exactly what I’ve been doing since getting my
copy of Summer Of Our Discomfort by
Porta Vittoria two weeks ago. I had ordered the album from Old Europa Café as a
happy accident. I was originally intending to purchase an album by another
artist on the OEC roster, but figured I would try and get the most out of the
shipping costs and support Rodolfo by ordering another album. I randomly
checked out the linked videos to Porta Vittoria’s “Sad Lieutenant G.D.” and
“Your Trash, My Treasure” and was immediately hooked. I took the gamble, bought
the album, and have been extremely pleased. I have not listened to much else
since receiving it.
I've been looking forward to doing this review since getting
the album and rocking out to it non-stop. I am going to do something a little
different with this review than I did with Miel Noir review and that is to do
an analysis on Porta Vittoria’s music videos. For a twelve track album, five
songs have videos, all made by the band themselves. That tells me the videos
are quite integral or important to the experiance and not just for promotional
purposes. Doing the Miel Noir review was tough, since I am not too proficient
in the language of music. However I am quite adept at looking at the mise en
scène and analyzing films. One of the goals
of this blog was to spend a little bit of time furthering my scholarship in
Italian film studies after doing my thesis on Antonio Margheriti, so I’ll
consider this Porta Vittoria essay part of that goal as well.
Biasness
None really – I just love their music and videos
General Overview and
Packaging
Porta Vittoria is a new band to the scene, with Summer of
our Discomfort being their debut album,
just released this past summer. The band is a duo, made up of Christian Ryder
and Lisa Duse, both filling in a myriad number of roles.
Describing the sound of Porta Vittoria is difficult, since
they do not fit in the normal neofolk/military pop/martial/neo classical mold.
The description for the album at the Old Europa Café website describes the
sound of the band:
[Porta Vittoria] combines high class sounds from
different genres and cultures moving between noise and classic, jazz and blues,
electronica and ambient: a musical globalism for modern incompatible societies.
But most of all Porta Vittoria deliver a true "Mediterranean pop".
The Google+ biography of the band describes their sounds as:
Defined as a "global
rétro-avant-garde", Porta Vittoria has its roots in the combination of
sounds from various genres and cultures, in order to conceive a musical
globalism in modern incompatible societies.
When I think of the term “retro avant garde” I think of
Laibach and how they describe themselves as “retro futurism”. Both Porta Vittoria
and Laibach have a lot in common in this regard. While Porta Vittoria lacks the
industrial, bombastic, and martial elements found in Laibach, both band are
idiosyncratic in their sound, but have a continuity that draws on kitsch,
retro, with some added deconstructive-ism. I hate to tag Porta Vittoria as a
post-modern band, since that is label that has been overused for the last few
decades and many would argue that we are actually in an unnamed
post-post-modern age (some would say post 9/11, but I believe that to be
pandering to Americanism). However with their subversion of kitsch elements and
retro sounds, Porta Vittoria definitely fits the attribute.
I am not sure about the term “Mediterranean pop”. When the
word “pop” is suffixed to a non-geographic noun, such as synthpop, bit-pop,
military pop, electro-pop, etc. – it does sound like it’s own genre. However
when “pop” is suffixed to a geographic noun, such as J-Pop, K-Pop, and so on,
it sounds like popular music from Japan or Korea or wherever. The music is
definitely avant garde, and its neofolk/martial qualities (and ergo inclusion
in this blog) is mostly guilty by association by being part of the Old Europa Café lineup.
I am not sure what Porta Vittoria is, but what they are is
different and they sound good.
 |
| Summer of our Discomfort (personal collection) |
The release proper is in a glossy digipack with booklet and
sticker. The booklet has some nice aesthetics to it in terms of typeface and
layout using the white space. However what space they do use is unfortunately
wasted by using lyrical excerpts instead of the lyrics in their entirety. The
lack of full lyrics is near criminal since I am unable to follow along with the
lyrics 100%. Both Christian and Lisa sometimes sport some full accents and some
words can hard to identify to an English speaker such as myself. They both
sound lovely singing, but not being able to follow along does dampen the
experience. This may have been mitigated if the band had their own website and
posted lyrics in their entirety. Here is nice gem of lyrics in the booklet for
“Concrete Island”:
 |
| Yes, you are. |
But alas, in the age of Facebook, access to a band’s lyrics
is the exception and not the norm.
Track by Track & Video Analysis
World Crashing Down
The Summer of our Discomfort opens with a synthpop inspired track. The first half of the song Lisa
provides the ethereal vocals, lamenting the bleak words that “we’re getting
neurotic from chemical waste” and our “existence is wasted in an assembly
line”. The music is key/piano-esque driven and mellow with a nice beat. At the
half way point of the song the vocals stop and the music picks up. The song
becomes faster and more grandiose, and in a way, optimistic. A counter to the
song’s first half that was more misanthropic in lyrical content. The song is
saying that the world sucks (crashing down!) from a variety of over stimuli,
but we will be ok in the end.
Thematically, if I had to compare this song to another song,
it would be “Kein Problem” by Melotron:
Jeder weiß, dass der Kanzler ein Lügner ist
Und dass Vasallen bis zum letzten Tag marschieren
Jeder weiß, dass die Front sich verschoben hat
Und dass Helden nicht wirklich existieren
Jeder weiß, dass der Krieg längst entschieden ist
Und dass die Guten stets verlieren
Alles kein problem…..
Verdict – Good song
Official video from the Porta Vittoria YouTube profile
The video begins with a window shot of a lake before showing
Lisa in a red one piece, hosiery and boots reminiscent of flight attendants
during the golden age of commercial aviation post WW2. She stands amidst
glass buildings and business parks, but are void of other people save herself.
Footage of her singing is juxtaposed against other found or stock footage. It’s
mostly in black and white, but it is various clips showing cities, buildings,
factories, machines, science at work, signs, traffic, construction, etc. This
all looks to be footage from industrial shorts and educational films. When
combined together the footage takes on a City Symphony quality. If you’ve seen
Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) or the more well known Man with a
Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov, then
the resemblance between those films and the first half of “World Crashing Down”
is apropos. These retro clips do tie into the “retro” aspect of Porta Vittoria
perfectly.
At the halfway points of the song, Lisa not only stops with
her singing, but steps out of the video entirely, leaving only clips montaged
together the carry the video’s narrative. In this latter half of the song, the
clips are now drawing from different sources: B-sci-fi and horror flicks,
pornography, experimental shorts, cult classic movies and Japanese hentai
anime. While I wish I could identify which Hentai they are from (I see no naughty
tentacles, so I suspect we are not in Toshio Maeda’s La Blue Girl or Urotsukidōji territory) I can identify some of the other clips: a
dissected alien from Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction (1995), a red flying demon from Dennis Muren’s Equinox (1970), Dorothy and her red shoes from The
Wizard of Oz (1939), Ray Harryhausen’s
Kraken from the original Clash of the Titans (1981), a giant chainsaw wielding Nazi from the
Australian action-comedy series Danger 5 (2012), Pee Wee Herman from his eponymous children’s show, a spaceship
from This Island Earth (1955),
and the unmasking of the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera (1925).
To further compound things, these clips are also edited into
nature footage of mountains, clouds, canyons, flowers, sunsets, glaciers, desertscapes
and rolling sylvan fields. It’s almost as weirder and more bizarre the clips
get, the more serene and tranquil the nature footage it is juxtaposed against
gets. Sergei Eisenstein would be proud of the feeling of unrest delivered from
the edited clips in contest with each other. The film ends on the shot of a
rustic cabin by a lake before returning to the window shot of the lake that the
video started with, in essence bookending it or a return to normality. With
this being the final shot, it seems in the contest of over stimulation (the
crashing hectic world) and nature, nature comes out triumphant.
Moments We Have Stars in Our Eyes
A sad song, with a melancholy piano with occasional subtle
ethereal flairs. Percussion with a minor jazz element picks up a third of the
way into the song, giving it a cinematic quality. Christian provides a subdued choral refrain that is a on the
introspective side. The song ends with the music picking up in a resolved way –
sad, but happy at the same time.
Verdict – Good song
Official video from the Porta Vittoria YouTube profile
Some men are breast men. Some look at butts. An hourglass
figure for some. Or maybe that nerdy look in scenester glasses. Me? I love stockings
and hosiery. From pinup girls in garters to burlesque dancers in thigh-highs. A
woman in stockings grabs my immediate attention. So it is with a bit of
discomfort that when I look at the video for “Moments We Have Stars In Our
Eyes” that I feel my fetishism of women in hosiery belittles or offends this
rather somber and serious video in Porta Vittoria’s repertoire. However, I’ll
take some solace in that Christian has definitely shot and edited this film to
accentuate the two female protagonist’s stocking clad legs, so maybe I
shouldn’t feel ashamed at all. In a way, the stocking fetishism almost recalls
a Tinto Brass like quality to the work (except less ass shots) who despite his
subject matter, made sure to make his beautiful actresses even more beautiful,
and that is definitely going on in this video.
This video, along with the video for “Sad Lieutenant G.D.”,
has a distinct narrative going for them. However this video has the most
subtext and is extremely multifaceted. The short narrative of this story is two
women in love with each other rendezvous and take their own lives together by
overdosing on sleeping pills. The black and white photography is not dark
enough to be a noir, but it still adds a somber element to the story. The
tragic love between the women recalls David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001): both this video and Lynch’s film depict a
lesbian relationship in a humble and emotive way, but ultimately tragic.
There are some interesting and subtle moments in this video.
In the beginning, the blond lady wakes up in a large bed alone. She looks over
to the other side and even puts her hand there. We are not sure who should be
occupying this portion of the bed. Perhaps she is in a relationship with
another, probably a man? She has been waiting for him to leave for an extended
period so she can receive her female lover?
I suspect this is strongly the case and the bed is not
shared with her female lover. The black haired lover is actually en route to
the blond woman’s apartment via train and long walks and carries her luggage
with her. Halfway to the apartment the black haired lover abandons her luggage
to the streets. This is a critical scene in many aspects. Firstly, if she lived
with the expecting blonde beauty, she would’ve carried the luggage to her
destination – their house. The luggage has wheels so it’s not a hindrance at
her travels. Instead the abandoning of the luggage is metaphor for the black
haired woman leaving her doubt of taking her life behind. Another way to put it
– if you’re going to commit suicide with someone, you don’t pack luggage for
the weekend. You don’t pack at all since it’s going to be a one way trip. She
had her luggage because she was not sure she was going to go all the way, she
could stay a while and then leave. Her having her luggage shows she had doubts
of dying with her lover, her leaving it shows she is committed.
Another subtle aspect of the video is the complete lack of
other people. The black haired woman traverses the train station, parks,
plazas, and streets and there is no other soul to be found (one car does drive
by in one scene, but I write this off as a fluke or accident since every other
shot in this video has been meticulous to show no other person). In this world
only the blonde and the black haired women exist. They are literally all alone
but together. It could be their
relationship has put them in this situation. The world does not want them and
offers no other people for them to be with in any capacity, so they leave the
world together as lovers.
The video also depicts it is Christmas time, with snow and
publicly decorated trees. A time usually devoted to spending time with your
loved ones, but also a terrible time to be alone.
The two lovers do not commiserate their relationship with
sex prior to taking their lives. Instead they talk to each other, gently
touching, caressing, kissing, and finally overdosing on pills. In a way it
shows that their relationship is much more tender or truthful. You can have sex
and not love that person. But you don’t touch/interact with someone the way
they do in “Moments We Have Stars in Our Eyes” without being in love with that
person.
Kaziglu Bey
Kaziglu (sic) Bey means “Lord Impaler” and was the moniker
attached to Vlad the Impaler by the Ottoman Empire. Vlad is more commonly
associated as an inspiration for Dracula, but he was more infamous at his time
for his skirmishes against the Ottomans during the 1400s and his signature
motif of impaling his foes.
Porta Vittoria’s song takes this route of analyzing Vlad.
“Kaziglu Bey” is an instrumental proper, with a real brooding synth riff,
slight militant percussion with some ethnic instruments, chimes, and a wind
instrument that I cannot identify. It definitely has a Middle Eastern feel to
it. The song also has some sound samples incorporated into it, which what
sounds like rattling chains and swords being unsheathed. “Kaziglu Bey” is
atmospheric and eerie, while remaining accessible for normal listening.
Though the song lacks lyrics, the album’s booklet contains a
excerpt penned by Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu that glorifies the deeds of
Vlad.
Verdict – Good Song
Official video from the Porta Vittoria YouTube profile
The video for “Kaziglu Bey” takes its cues from the video
for “World Crashing Down” in that it is a montage of edited clips from other
sources. Unlike “World Crashing Down”, the band has not edited themselves into
the video and it exists solely as black and white clips depicting life in the
Middle East decades ago, with a specific call out to Jerusalem. Onlookers gawk
at a shackled bear on display while Hasidic Jews bow in the shadows. A shepherd
herds his flock of goats into a village, old men gossip, and people mill about
the markets and stone buildings. The clips also contain footage of a fictional
representation of Vlad himself and ends with him overlooking a field of impaled
people.
There are political overtones here. Perhaps a response to
the recent turmoil in Turkey with all the protestors being injured (and worse)
by their government? Perhaps a call for Vlad to come back and dispose of the
corrupt Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? Unfortunately, political science
is not my forte and I don’t think I am qualified to assume the political
stances of Porta Vittoria based on one song.
Fire in the Boudoir
Acoustic guitars carry this track as Lisa and Christian take
turns singing. This track is how defunct Belborn would sound if they upped
their production and incorporated other sounds into their folk sound. This is
the most neofolky track on the album and it’s executed well.
Verdict – Good song
Guenther Lause Ist Nicht Bekannt
If Summer of our Discomfort has a low point, it is unfortunately this track. All the other tracks
on this album have complex layers of music, sound interesting and great vocal
delivery. This track is unfortunately on the boring side. Lisa’s vocals suffer
here – and are especially disappointing after seeing her impressive delivery on
other tracks, particularly “Your Trash, My Treasure”. The music sounds
disjointed, like pieces of other songs stitched together. It doesn’t have the
fluidity or cohesion that the other gems in this album do.
Verdict – Worst track on the album
Concrete Island
You want house music? In their idiosyncratic approach, Porta
Vittoria approaches the house genre of music with this track and pulls it off
quite well. The beat is catchy without going full house/rave/techno. In fact,
it’s more “chill” than “groove” in the beginning, and perhaps the samples of
oceanic waves crashing in the background of the music gives it that feeling.
The latter half of the song picks up the bpm and turns to full on danceable
track.
The lyrical representation of this song in the booklet is
hilariously bad however (see above).
Verdict – Good track
Death in Venice
“Death in Venice” begins as a lounge track, with some heavy
cymbals action and sparse piano work. Definitely a piece to sit at a small
round table, drink in hand as you take in a smoky atmosphere. The vocals say “I
can’t take my eyes off you”, so the setting could very well be in a lounge
watching an attractive performer.
However, at the half way point the music shifts genre and
becomes a shoegazer track, reminiscent of the Canadian band Faunts
(particularly their Feel.Love.Thinking.Of
album). The lounge music is dropped and instead has some dream-pop or light
space rock/electronic quality to it. Both Christian and Lisa deliver soft,
almost whispered, vocals to which the music compliments well.
Verdict – first half decent track, last half good track
Captatio Benevolentiae
This track starts off eerily, with words spoken in reverse
and pulsing noise that sounds like cues from Dark City (1998). After the this
introduction, the song starts proper with a mix of piano and jazz work. There
is a small element of space rock too hidden in some of the synth riffs. The sax
elements give it a bit more bourgeois feeling, and I can just imagine a glass
of bubbly in my hand.
Verdict – Good song
Sad Lieutenant G.D.
The first song I heard by Porta Vittoria which lured me into
their claws. If there is one track on this album that sums of Porta Vittoria’s
sound, and defines them as a band, I would posit it is this track.
“Sad Lieutenant G.D.” is a fun and catchy track that has a
lot of different sounds going for it. Sometimes festive sounding, sometimes
western. Sometimes folky and sometimes even a bit of light rock. Lisa and
Christian take turns singing, giving the song an even more multifaceted
feeling. There’s a section at the 2:15 mark that makes me think of Derniere
Volonte on their later – pop-ier albums, so I am going to go with that in
trying to equate this song to something tangible. I don’t have the capabilities
to even suggest where the sounds are coming from, so I will not even try. Let’s
just leave it at it is complex but great song.
Verdict – Amazing Song
Official video from the Porta Vittoria YouTube profile
Of the videos from Porta Vittoria, “Sad Lieutenant G.D.” has
the most narrative going for it. There is a definite story, start to finish,
and it fairly accessible to watch.
The setting of the video appears to be a post-apocalyptic
setting. In a way, “Sad Lieutenant G.D.” recalls the filone of Mad Max and Escape from New York
clones that Italy was churning out in the early 1980s: 2019 – Dopo la
caduta di New York (1983), 1990:
I guerriere del Bronx (1982), I
nuovi barbari (1983) and many others. Lisa
portrays the protagonist in this video – her bullet belt and black western
attire recall a mixture of The Man with No Name from Sergio Leone’s westerns
and the Vault dweller from Fallout 3.
The video starts off with Lisa surveying and then leaving a
smoldering battlefield. The carnage no doubt caused by her, and in a way, the
smoking fields harkens to the fields of impaled bodies shown at the end of the
video of “Kaziglu Bey”. Perhaps Lisa is as ruthless as Vlad himself? She looks serious, but contemplative as
she sits aside a lake and wanders its shore.
She happens upon a funeral procession manned by mourners in
tattered clothes as they carry a coffin. And who would the deceased be? The cowboy
hat atop the coffin that matches the one draped on Lisa’s back provides insight
in that she is probably witnessing her own procession.
Her travels next take her to an abandoned building in the
middle of a canyon that has two grave markers, one clearly marked as “unknown”.
After much pacing about the grounds, Lisa deals herself cards from her tarot
deck, briefly shown earlier in the video as she sat at the lake. The tarot
cards make me think of Italo Calvino’s story Il castello dei destini
incrocitai in which characters tell their
story via tarot cards to each other. I suspect Lisa is trying to write her own
destiny: she probably has killed many people (as alluded to in the opening
shot), but seeing images of her own funeral processing and the grave of the
unknown (which probably contains her remains), she deals from the deck hoping
for a better fate than the one she is destined. She has more visions of a
skulled faced woman that she draws her pistol upon. It is this brief encounter
with a symbol of death that Lisa decides not to fire. Instead after consulting
with a speeding clock (signifying her time is rapidly coming to a close) she
discards her gun, deciding a more pacifist route is perhaps in order. She
ascends into the snowy mountains. Looking defiantly at the mountain summit, she
discards a final tarot card – that of a skeletal corpse - and ascends to her
fate.
Le Reve Et La Vie
A serious sounding track, it has the same atmosphere that
“Kaziglu Bey” does, it puts you at unease. There is a definite military sound
to this song without going overt military-pop. There is some “chanting” of
sorts that makes me think of an medieval army getting equipped for a sortie
along with some aggressive pushing of a piano note. A slight electronic-noise
pops up in the background now and then that sounds chiptune-ish.
Verdict – Good song
Your Trash, My Treasure
Easily the best song on Summer of our Discomfort, just
barely beating out “Sad Lieutenant G.D.” for this honour. While “Sad Lieutenant
G.D.” greatly sums up Porta Vittoria’s style, range, and abilities, this
cohesive song shows them at them at top form. The song is pure jazz and lounge
bliss. Lisa’s vocals are sultry, confident, and seductive and her English with
enunciated just right. The lyrics are clear and easy to follow without textual
aid and are catchy and memorable. The production professional and spotless. The
jazz element puts you directly into a Robert Rodriguez flick.
The song is a take on the adage of “another person’s junk is
another person’s treasure”. I find
one of the important lines in the song to “I feel myself completely different
from you”. It takes the trash/treasure dichotomy to the extreme, that the
difference in how two people can perceive what is important/valuable is so
great that they can lose their own commonality or even connection. I also
connect with the line about “bad taste being great to you” since it affirms my
own passion with exploitation/genre/populist cinema, the type of films shunned
by many movie aficionados.
Verdict – Amazing song
Official video from the Porta Vittoria YouTube profile
The second video I saw for Porta Vittoria, and what sealed
the deal for me to take the plunge with their album.
The setting for “Your Trash, My Treasure” is among abandoned
factories, warehouses, and rooftops that have fallen into ruin, slowly being
overtaken by small trees and other foliage. The setting has the same
post-apocalyptic elements found in “Sad Lieutenant G.D.” and it would not be
too farfetched to say they take place in the same world or are canon to each
other. The video also has ties to the message and clips from “World Crashing
Down” in which that video nature re-establishes its dominance on the over
stimulus world. “Your Trash, My Treasure” seems to show this relationship of
nature and modernity as well.
Lisa makes an appearance in this video as does Christian
himself who has been absent from the other videos. Both play a more omnipotent
role for the narrative, singing to the listener/viewer as they traverse the
hallways and lots of the industrial ruins. The stoic nature of Lisa from “World
Crashing Down” and “Sad Lieutenant G.D.” has been replaced by a sultrier
demeanor, which complements the lounge/jazz elements of the music. Christian
looks uncomfortable and nervous.
The third protagonist of the video is an unnamed woman who
disrobes, runs among the ruins nude until settling on some debris of circuit
boards and wires that she turns into a rudimentary bikini. You would think after seeing the
pornographic and hentai clips from “World Crashing Down” and the stocking clad
women from “Moments We Have Stars In Our Eyes” that this character would be
even more sexualized. But the exact opposite is true. Though she is nude, her
actions don’t sexualize her. She goofily sits atop of items, wobbles around,
makes weird faces. If anything, her character is more of a nymph, dryad, or
some sort of sylvan creature, frolicking through the foliage of the ruins. Her
body is in its most natural state (nude), and even lacking in unnatural
attributes: tattoos and plastic surgery. So for her, she explores the debris
looking for curious and having a bit of fun.
Christian explores the ruins, taking in its nooks and
crannies. Lisa however finds something to treasure amidst the rubble – a giant
bull skull!
That’ll look good up on the wall.
Cosmic Melancholy of the Thinking Ocean
The final track of the album. Not exactly ending the
experience with a bang, but not with a whimper either. It’s a decent enough
track, but after the amazingness of the preceding tracks, “Cosmic Melancholy of
the Thinking Ocean” is a bit anti-climatic. The song starts off as space-synth
track, like a subdued, less poppy Galaxy Hunter song. It finds some footing at
the end with the addition of Lisa’s vocals and ends better than it started.
Verdict – Decent track
Final Thoughts
The only sour note for this release is the lack of lyrics in
the digipack. The craftsmanship of the music and production values, the range
of music stylings that work in tandem with each other, the fun songs and the
serious songs, along with the accompanying videos on YouTube make this an
impressive debut release. I look forward to their next release!
Both bands I’ve reviewed so far, Porta Vittoria and Miel
Noir don’t categorize easy into neofolk and martial tropes. But like the band
Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio which flirts with other sounds, I think bands of this
ilk challenge or make fluid the barriers of these genres.
As for me, this was a good review to do. I felt more at ease
looking at the videos than I did with the music proper. However I do hope I
gain a bit more proficiency with the music analysis department as this blog
goes on.
Cultural References
B-films, nature, Vlad the Impaler
Official Links
https://www.facebook.com/portavittoria
- FaceBook
http://www.youtube.com/user/cosmicmelancholy
- YouTube Channel
Other Resources
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Porta+Vittoria
- Discogs Entry
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