In My Room Saturday Saturn by: Steve Scully Mon:11-Jun-07 Label: Suiteside Year: 2007 WB rating 34 out of 100

It’s tough to say why something leaves you with a terrible taste in your mouth. Sometimes it can be another ‘Aussie battler’ story on A Current Affair, sometimes it can be something more tangible, like the taste of a hangover. Other times it just can’t be reasoned out: something otherwise inoffensive and relatively tasteful can really rub you up the wrong way.

Italy isn’t cutting edge, musically-speaking. Watch Eurovision, listen to those gimps in Eiffel 65 – I challenge you not to shake your head when you remember their hit single from 1999 ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’ – and you’ll get the idea of where Italy sits in the world of contemporary pop music. Genova-based label, Suiteside, is doing its best to breathe life into the ailing scene; In My Room, originally a solo-project for Parma-born Marco Monica, is one of their latest signings, and you could say that the somewhat graceful blend of minimalist vocals, acoustic guitar, violin and synth rhythms sounds like the perfect antidote for a music scene overwhelmed by roaring pop-opera singers, glittering dance acts and glass-eyed DJs. While In My Room may be at the other end of the spectrum, and does exude some degree of originality, an antidote they are not. In truth, they’re just as mind-numbing as those they stand against.

Opening track, ‘Covered By Secret’, is about as cohesive a song as you’re likely to find on Saturday Saturn. Driven by the aurally-pleasing hum-and-click of underplayed synth rhythms, the song leads listeners through gradually welling-up strings and a gently-picked acoustic guitar – all relatively nice, if boring. In a song like this, the clincher is really the vocals, and here they fail to impress. Understated, whispery vocals are the realm of folk musicians, and you can hear Marco Monica straining to create an atmosphere of intimacy through his quiet voice, sitting underneath his self-produced swell. Unfortunately, he sounds like a lo-fi Maynard Keenan, the vocals more rhythmic than melodic. The strength of this song lies in the string-infused breaks between acoustic guitar and vocals, when it’s just the synth and violin – here’s when Monica truly connects with the audience, and when his ideas find clarity.

Saturday Saturn is a work of introspection: Monica himself produced this, and it’s really the child of a love triangle between a man, his computer and his acoustic guitar. ‘If Winter Comes’ again exhibits the minimalist, underwhelming vocal melodies, and the picked guitar makes a return to the forefront, sitting again on top of clicking synth rhythms. ‘The Bed Outside The Window’, even more that the preceding tracks, reveals the artist looking within himself to find his muse. With hints of real-life sampling – wind rushing past, dog barking – we’re led into Monica’s world, but unfortunately, this isn’t a world where music is that terrific at all. All through this track, there’s an irritatingly intrusive cut-and-paste guitar, which gains even more momentum, detracting from any sense of peace or isolation that one might expect in a song devoted to creating a personal, human feel. Thankfully, there’s not a monotonous, robotic vocal line to be found.

There’s a sensation that this record, although intimate, is a tad unfinished. Aside from the multi-layered vocal climax to ‘My Sweet Distress’, there’s not much here to suggest that any song is more than one idea prolonged over three minutes. In fact, a lot of the tracks could even be the same idea as those preceding it, merely passed off as a different song. The texture of the synth rhythms throughout hardly changes, and Monica seems to know how to play a guitar one way, and one way only. Strings are brought in to alleviate boredom, but even the violin conclusion to the album at the end of ‘A Little Lightning’, and the well-produced, yet underdeveloped, violin-based ‘One Day, The Other Day’ can’t break up the fact that the album has a distinct pattern, and that pattern too often errs on the side of the complacency and navel-gazing.

So, without being as openly, vomitously self-indulgent as some of the year’s worst releases (Arbouretum, Shapes and Sizes), In My Room is quietly, and unassumingly so. Beneath the tasteful little beats, nice string licks and quiet vocals, there’s a thread of indecent self-assurance. A thread that continues through each song, and leaves you, at the album’s conclusion, wishing In My Room had indeed stayed locked up and hidden away. Is it worse to wank about with over-the-top guitar solos, or to sit there, smiling and shoving your own misguided sense of self-worth down someone’s throat nice and quietly?