Jennifer Gentle comes from Padova, a foggy city in Northern Italy, not so far from Venice. She was born in early 2000 and her short life has been both quiet and tumultuous, at the same time. Actually, Jennifer Gentle is not a girl, but a band formed by two guys: Marco Fasolo, 23, who sings and plays guitar, and Alessio Gastaldello, 30, thinking drummer.
Everything started with Carcers, Marco’s previous band, a highly volatile teen combo propelled by a mix of sheer enthusiasm and chaotic attitude that quickly drove them nowhere. In 1999, a rather disappointed Marco left the group, dropped out of school and moved to Berlin. By day he worked 12-hour shifts as an ice cream man and at night he bothered his flatmates writing songs and fantasizing about a new band. When he came back, a fortuitous meeting with Alessio, already a Carcers fan, gave birth to Jennifer Gentle.
From the start, they set themselves apart from a national scene mostly devoted to the worship of ‘90s post-rock icons. Their long-term fascination with Syd Barrett, 13th Floor Elevators and Joe Meek production techniques was at odds with local trends and looked definitely uncool in a world where June of 44 was king.
Nevertheless Jennifer Gentle started immediately cooking their own brand of psychedelia – an almost impossible-to-describe melting pot of whacked experimentation, deep fried eccentricity and acoustic beauty. Recording in a basement with primitive gear, the band (at this point augmented by Isacco Maretto on guitar, and Nicola Crivellari on bass) quickly sketched a bunch of songs for their first, self-released album titled I Am You Are. Critics loved it, but audiences were mostly puzzled by its quirky content. Naturally, the band showed absolutely no interest in watering down their approach.
Stubborn or simply idiotic, the Jennifers kept beating their own path. The second, still home-recorded, album Funny Creatures Lane was an even more excessive affair: a colorful, hallucinated phantasmagoria bubbling with ideas and unpredictable noises. Someone noticed it: people from other countries, sometimes even from other continents, asked and wrote about it. Radio stations in New York, Paris and Belgrade played it. The band slowly started building a kind of fan-base, especially in the US and Great Britain, where their wigged-out musical offerings found more sympathetic audiences and won appreciation by fellow musicians like Oneida, Acid Mothers Temple, Sun City Girls and Chris Robinson from the Black Crowes (strange, but true). They toured and recorded with Acid Mothers Temple’s Kawabata Makoto and cut a session at WFMU. When Nicola left the band, Paolo Mioni (on bass & guitar) and Liviano Mos (keyboards) stepped in to fill out the Jennifer Gentle live show.
In February 2004 Jennifer Gentle became the first Italian band ever to sign with Sub Pop Records. Suddenly, they became semi-popular in their own neighborhood. Strangely, this brought the band full circle: back in 1998, a 16-year old Marco Fasolo had sent a comically badly recorded demo tape to a certain Seattle label…
Valende is the third Jennifer Gentle studio album. It was recorded and mixed by Marco and Alessio in the same dark basement on the outskirts of Padova, Italy, between February and June 2004. This doesn’t mean that the album is your average soup of lo-fi shrieks and yells. Better equipment, decent mics and an awful lot of work make it sound warm and luscious. It is also very different from the previous Jennifer Gentle albums: there are a couple of the usual brainless pop nuggets, but most of the album has a sad, even spooky feel. It is a collection of songs about things lost in the deep of the woods, sinister campfire scenes and that dizzying sensation of loss you can have under a moonlit sky. It is also about quiet dreams of luminous gardens, but sometimes quiet can also be scary.
Marco and Alessio played all the instruments and sang all the vocals. As usual, they tried new instruments and new solutions: toy glockenspiel, bowed guitars, old Bontempi air organs, plastic flutes, chains and clocks pop up here and there (and a deflating helium balloon makes for a good solo in “I do dream you!”).
The Jennifers, whose names are actually Marco and Alessio, had the time of their life writing and recording this album – even when they had to stop because someone in the other room was chopping wood or a dog barked in the street. They think it contains some of their best songs, capturing also a bit of the womb-like magic of that dusty basement. Maybe next time they will record in a proper studio. Maybe not.
