“There was a sensation that everything was possible,” the fashion journalist Renata Molho has written of Milan in the 1980s. Money flowed, parties raged, and the streets were filled with glamorous foreigners. “It was a very superficial atmosphere, but it was vibrant,” Molho writes. That description goes to to the heart of the Italian composer Daniele Luppi’s MILANO. Luppi achieved his renown in Los Angeles, where he has worked as an arranger for artists like Gnarls Barkley and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but his own work harks back to his home country. Rome, his 2011 collaboration with Danger Mouse, was a soundtrack to an imaginary spaghetti western featuring high-profile guests like Jack White and Nora Jones. Now MILANO pays tribute to another bygone era in another city, one where he reveled as a teenager in the early 1980s.
In much the same way that utilizing White and Jones to evoke Ennio Morricone’s heyday didn’t make much sense on paper but somehow worked out on Rome, Luppi now recruits New Yorkers Parquet Courts and Karen O to pay tribute to the city nicknamed “Milano da bere” (or “drinking Milan”) due to its excesses. That city shared more than a few parallels with New York City—like Keith Haring’s floor-to-ceiling decoration of Milan’s Fiorucci store, for one thing—so it makes sense that Luppi’s album-length ode to that time and place also recalls the nascent sound of NYC punk.
Across MILANO’s frisky nine songs and half-hour run time, I’d be hard-pressed to identify Luppi’s fingerprints, aside from some bell chimes here and some sax squalls there. But when the pairing of Parquet Courts and Karen O is this inspired, who wouldn’t be inclined to step back and just let the sparks fly? Much in the way that one of the delights of HBO’s “The Deuce” is simply seeing James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal strut the mean streets of 1970s New York, hearing Andrew Savage and O voice the album’s many wound-up and desperate narrators is thrilling in its own right.
Parquet Courts nail a sound somewhere between late Velvet Underground, the Modern Lovers, and the Feelies (with a hearty nod to Pavement’s prime slack): gritty and seedy, bleary but somehow still bright-eyed. Savage’s jaded delivery on “Soul and Cigarette” evokes Lou Reed most explicitly, flatly singing of a “bloodthirsty saint with the soul of a whore” as the band shuffles behind him, a glint of glockenspiel brightening the corners of the song. Chimes and handclaps give a bit of bounce to “Mount Napoleon,” though the lyrics reveal a fraying underneath: nosebleeds and the wish for “a rock” (not, presumably, of the Cartier variety). Later, the band ventures into the detuned twang of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, and the skronking horns on “Café Flesh” tip a hat to New York’s no wave heritage.
On the songs that showcase O, the Courts’ sound ramps up, suggesting a cocktail of Benzedrine, espresso, and overflowing ashtrays. The nervy guitar jangle and bouncing bass of “Talisa” revamps VU’s “Real Good Time Together” into the perfect springboard for O, who pouts, mewls, and doot-doots across the ode to former model Talisa Soto. Post-punk wiriness underpins “The Golden Ones,” where the spindly guitars and throbbing basslines snap against O’s pouty come-on: “With me and you/The pleasure is all yours.”
“Memphis Blues Again” slyly name-checks a Bob Dylan song, and Savage’s voice frays as it exhausts its rhymes, while the band nails the anxious air of early Fall sides. The Fall comes to mind again when the groove tightens into a stomp on standout “Flush,” in which O plays her most petulant and assured character on the album, sneering and strutting over the beat as she yelps like Mark E. Smith recast as a fashionista.
Luppi’s name may never cross your mind during playback of MILANO; rather than display his talents as composer and arranger, he lets his casting and talent booking do all the talking. But O’s delivery throughout would certainly be enough to catch Molho’s attention. Like the city in its ’80s golden age, MILANO is superficial, vibrant, and full of possibility.
