Puà + Baseball Gregg

PUÀ

«I’m always afraid that my words might sound fake», confesses Touch Me, the song that opens this album, which is called Animali and represents PUÀ’s debut, out on April 5th for WWNBB Collective and Dischi Sotterranei. Then something happens: a love, with the phlegmatic pace of a sinuous beat, little by little takes shape and awareness. And it is as if the song started on a launch pad and launched itself out: «Please touch me» is an invitation that contains both a request for help and the strong desire to overcome our solitudes, the obstacles to our communication. This sort of launching pad is a common trait in all the songs on Animali: from the tiptoeing synth pop of the nocturnal Magic Dance, to the psychedelic-colored indie rock of Fireman; from the glam tinged with blues cadences of Beacon Margarita, to the swarm of percussion that besieges the melody of King Grace. Each track sings in a different way a sort of invocation to free ourselves from the chains of this life, from its ballast, from the experiences we have since childhood within a system that wants us to sleep.

BASEBALL GREGG

Baseball Greggs are Samuel and Luca. The first comes from the city of Pavement, the second is a fellow villager of Guglielmo Marconi: they met in Bologna in 2013 and became friends. The first songs took shape in a small rented room at the beginning of via Mazzini and were recorded in a dozen torrid late spring evenings on the top floor of a large building in Bolognina. Sam – after a year spent in Italy – returns to America at the end of May: Luca bids farewell to the airplane clutching a small box full of songs in his fist. Baseball Gregg’s self-titled EP was released on cassette simultaneously in Italy (La Barberia Records – Modena) and in the United States (Harlot – Brooklyn) on Cassette Store Day 2014.

In July 2015 the two met again, this time for a holiday in California. However, they spend the sunny afternoons of July and August locked in Sam’s bedroom writing, producing, and playing. Thus they recorded their debut on LP, Vacation, in just over a month: a full half hour of tropical mellotron and vocal harmonies that swim across the Pacific Ocean, from Garage della Baia to Japanese city-pop. Vacation, recorded in Stockton (California) in the summer of 2015 and mastered by Dylan Wall (Weed, Craft Spells), was released on 30 April 2016 again by La Barberia on cassette (in the United States) and on CD (in Italy).

After releasing Ciao for Now (2016) – a little experimental pop extravaganza recorded while on holiday in Italy in summer 2016 – and Sleep (2018), their second LP, which features original artwork by Apichatpong as its cover Weerasethakul, Thai director and artist, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, the band began touring far and wide.

In 2019 the band began an extensive tour of the United States and Europe, appearing at SXSW and Iceland Airwaves. Baseball Gregg released a new song every month in 2019: the project, titled Calendar, unfolded slowly, one song at a time. These 12 singles were collected in a physical album, released on February 28, 2020 via Z Tapes (Slovakia) on vinyl and cassette, while La Barberia released a limited edition “Calendar companion book” of 120 pages. During the lockdown months of 2020 they remotely wrote and recorded Indoors, a 6-track EP in collaboration with Chicago bedroom pop legend Boy Romeo, released in December 2020.

Pastimes is the new album by Baseball Gregg, composed for the first time with the full band. Since Sam’s arrival in Italy at the end of 2021, the Italian-Californian formation has created twenty songs which were distributed over the course of three months in as many record releases and then merged into a Full Length in September 2022, “one of the best albums of the year” (Week in Pop).