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Love To Death by Bebaloncar — new album review
Love To Death by Bebaloncar — new album review
Fall is upon us and you need a soundtrack to help you devour those grey skies, orange leaves, and those feelings of longing that you just can’t place. Italy has yielded just the thing for you. The album is called Love to Death, Bebaloncar is its messenger, and the time to listen to it is nigh!
Hailing from the city of Bologna, this gruppo tenebroso is comprised of Scanna on vocals and guitar, Iris Martyr on guitar and backing vocals, Fab on bass with Carlo Altobelli occasionally sitting in on drums in the studio. The name of the group comes from 1960s Serbian black-and-white film starlet Beba Loncar, who was often cast as the exotic seductress in many Italian films that she starred in.
Bebeloncar released Suicide Lovers in 2022, which the band themselves described as dark, neo-folk show gaze. Two years later, they released Diary of a Lost Girl which was a concept album “inspirato al cinema muto” later in 2024. Love to Death completed the bizarre love triangle in October 2025!
Scanna evokes Richard Butler, Hugh Cornwell, or Robyn Hitchcock as a vocalist and has a haunting delivery – sometimes through a wobbling Leslie but consistently with silvery calotype cadence and always with a dark Italian rasp. At least two guitars are featured throughout each of the tracks. One is a booming acoustic with Keith Richards’ Their Satanic Majesties Request-era strumming, and the other a peeling Psycho Candy electric with cavernous flange and exposed nerves. The two instruments call and respond to each other over a vast reverberating tintype that is the icy foundation of a lot of the songs.
The bass is liquid and the color of the darkest vinyl record but it is always iridescent. It wavers like a theatrical thunder sheet backstage, but all in slow motion. Although drums are absent on this album, that is OK. You feel their presence almost as phantom pains, but those are the sympathetic tones of the guitars and bass playing off of each other.
Bebaloncar
With the opener “Love is a Circle,” you think you hear the first notes of “There She Goes” by The La’s. But glance at the cover art of what looks like a sand-beaten fragile idol in magenta and orange, and you know that the mood has taken a barbed-wired and grainy turn. As the track wanes, cold dripping tremolo vocals emerge from felt darkness in an abandoned corridor. They warn you, as Siouxsie once did: “You’re lost, little girl!”
The track “Words” will facilitate disassociating, especially while walking through an old New England cemetery where the maple leaves are the yellow of a Monet dawn and they all have matching black tar spots. The calculated strumming of what sounds like a Gibson/Epiphone SJ-200 acoustic will remind you to look up and absorb the vision of a sulfuric halo over the park just after steady rainfall all morning. You might recall chord passages and the atmosphere of Wire’s “Ahead.”
Bebaloncar - Love To Death vinyl limited edition
One would assume that when you read the title “Until The End of the Fucking World” you might only catch “The End of The Fucking World” part, which is kind of where we’re at right now in the scheme of things. But it’s that “Until” part that changes things and like any post-punk New Romantic, the singer is one too! And so are you! The end of the world is where Scanna will follow you to! There is some percussion on this track, and there is a lot of flange. The percussion is the footsteps following you, the flange lights the path, and there is similar warmth in “She’s the Sun.”
Mary’s gone. Mary’s gone. She’s the Sun. She’s the Sun.
Though a simple song, the chords will linger in your psyche that is already weighed down with cinder blocks, but where it lies, it lies waiting for these very chords and they soothe. The wind picks up on a late November walk and the leaves are twisting upside down. The sun, although obscured by clouds (and almost gone along with Mary) casts a refracted rosy color on birch trees. As the song concludes, a virtual tape hiss lingers and it is the same frequency of rustling leaves!
“Streamers” caps off the album. On the whole, the album distills heartbreak, longing, and an almost palpable nostalgia for post-wave. But with “Streamers,” it finishes victoriously. More amber sunlight is hitting taller buildings. You can feel it on your forehead in this track. All is good. All the same feels you get when listening to Goldfrapp’s Seventh Tree.
To hear Love to Death in its entirety, and more from Bebaloncar, you can find them on Bandcamp or on all streaming platforms. You have a month and a half left of fall to savor and Bebaloncar is there to help!
Bebaloncar
Riffindots is Britta Pejic. Britta is a musician. Songwriter. Artist. Foreign Language Teacher. Grew up in Maine. Lived in France (The Basque Country). Now back in New England. Enjoys getting lost. Makes a lot of songs at home, puts them into a canister, then into a hatch and then through her own pneumatic tube system under the Atlantic. The songs are vacuumed out the other end, dusted off and polished by Console Lole, her loyal sound engineer back in Basque Country. It’s a system that works well for her. Follow @riffindots for cartoonish fun and visual mayhem or simply enjoy her music at https://brittapejic.bandcamp.com
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