“Forse None Sei Tu” is Alice Tambourine Lover’s Psychelic Dream Journal Song About a Lost Love Wandering on the Edges of Consciousness

Alice Tambourine Lover, photo courtesy the artists

“Forse Non Sei Tu” (“Maybe It’s Not You” in English) finds Italian psychedelic rock band Alice Tambourine Lover using a shuffling, overlapping structure in the guitar riffs and percussion to give the song a deep sense of reverie appropriate to its subject. The main riff mixes with a guitar lead more like the wailing and drone of one’s memories tangled with the emotions that fix them in your mind. In this case it sounds like words (albeit in Italian, easily translated into some approximation of the original into English thanks to the internet) of someone who was affected so deeply by a lover now lost the vivid emotional remembrances of which are delivered in poetic couplets of sensory memory rendered in terms of ice, fire, fantasies, sips of those memories and drowning in a whirlwind of images and experiences. And then imagining seeing that person who affected you so deeply in places you wish they could and would be but your emotions are so disordered you can’t be sure. The song is more like an sustained impressionistic experience than a song with conventional structure and logic, rather operating according to principles based more on intuition and dreams. Calling it psychedelic rock is perhaps misleading except for the aforementioned levels on which the music works. Sonically it has more in common with Mazzy Star, PJ Harvey and one of the great psychedelic rock bands of the alternative rock era, Sky Cries Mary. The use of acoustic sounds with the electric is so seamless the song consistently sounds like it could have emerged at any point across the last 50 years. Vocalist/guitarist/tambourine player Alice Albertazzi and dobro resonator guitarist Gianfranco Romanelli were once in the band ALIX together and recorded the album Good One with Steve Albini in 2009 but this newer material sounds like a fresh relaunch of the their creative instincts as musicians. Listen to “Forse Non Sei Tu” on Soundcloud and connect with Alice Tambourine Lover at the links below.