Shakedown

A year before Kim Gordon co-founded Sonic Youth, she published “Trash Drugs and Male Bonding,” an essay on New York’s hypermasculine fringe rock circuit. “Throughout one’s life,” she deadpanned in its opening lines, “one becomes ‘out of tune.’” Could Sam Fenton and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi possibly disagree? As Double Virgo, the pair make poorly mixed guitar music that feels borderline voyeuristic: two dudes, probably kind of drunk, fiddling with detuned Squiers and mourning the losses of their respective freaks. It isn’t the ear-splitting anarchy Gordon witnessed at CBGB, but it is earnest, which is particularly disarming for the bonding males in question.

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Fenton and Fehmi are better known as the guitarists of Bar Italia, a British band whose own vibe, until very recently, sat somewhere between Souvlaki and The Shining. Their strongest songs, like the slinky “calm down with me” and the jangly “changer,” showcased the duo at a vocal extreme—breathy and forlorn, like sexually repressed ghosts who never got any on Earth. As Double Virgo, they trade ghoulish abjection for chummy singsong, the sound of a jam session that wished to become a band. It’s ragtag, sloppy, and occasionally, pretty good.

Three albums in, is pretty good the best we can do? Shakedown, their latest, is conceptually tighter than its predecessors, aimless projects that weren’t that secretive about being hard-drive cleanouts. It’s the first Double Virgo album that doesn’t feel like a compilation, and with that comes the implicit admission that Fenton and Fehmi do take this seriously, even if it doesn’t always sound like it. The mixes are friendlier, the riffs cleaner, the songcraft more mature.

But the defining dilemma, and what traps Shakedown in the realm of pretty-good, is that they can’t seem to decide whether—or how—being “serious” accommodates their ragtag, boys-in-a-basement credo. This makes for frustratingly middle-ground music, where glimpses of maturity are cancelled out by boyish antics. Take “Role Play,” a feat of vocal layering that comes strikingly close to prime Police. It’s the best Fenton and Fehmi have ever sounded together—too bad what they’re saying is, “You give great head/You’re really good in bed/Your breath’s so sweet/I know you’re really neat.” These low points are puzzling, because if you follow these guys’ other work, you know that they’re capable of much more. Two months ago, Fenton released The Richest Man in Babylon OST, an original score for Bar Italia frontwoman Nina’s debut film. Compare his vocal performance on its surprisingly sleek “Aria” to this album’s “red card,” a clunker that sounds like the last man at the pub singing along to a Kia commercial.

The members of Bar Italia have been at pains to convince people that they’re genuine: not “elusive,” nor “mysterious,” but normal people making music they believe in. “No one’s sitting pensively scowling in the corner,” Fenton told one interviewer. With Double Virgo you’ll want to believe the rumor, if only to make life more interesting. Ironically, the best tracks here are the simpler, more understated ones, like “alarm bells in central plaza,” a paranoid ballad built around three chords, or “sams fragrant dungeon,” a plucky guitar anthem with the intimacy of a post-rehearsal noodling sesh. You wish there was more where it came from, which is maddening, because you know there is.

Is a polished studio album as true to Double Virgo as the demos we’re used to? Their output has often suggested a pair of talented musicians fucking around in their downtime: iPhone mics on the floor, mini-amps against the wall. The most rewarding Double Virgo release remains 2023’s Hardrive Heat Seeking, a wildly diverse 36-track collection that bottled the thrill of having a million ideas and no one to check you on them. It’s not a question of whether Fenton and Fehmi can make great studio albums—they’ve made them before. But so long as Double Virgo remain an outlet for low-stakes fun, the band will remain, too, trapped between competing ambitions.