Dusted Magazine (April 2007)
02-06-2008
Christa Pfangen comprise Mattia Coletti and Andrea Belfi, two renegades from Italy’s resurgent, ever-expanding underground. Belfi has already released several stunning solo discs: 2003’s Ned no2 on Chocolate Guns, and last year’s superlative Between Neck and Stomach, for Häpna. Watch me getting back the end isn’t quite as powerful as Belfi’s solo albums, and at first it appears rather slight. Many of the songs appear half-formed, as though Belfi and Coletti have stripped the core from the composition after dressing its body. After a few listens, however, this tactic becomes the album’s winning streak.
The duo rely on a rather minimal core of instruments and gestures - the rough hum of a harmonium; splintered acoustic guitars that shift from stubby single-note runs to brashly strummed chords, and skittering drums that accent at the oddest moments. This narrowed focus gives the album an aesthetic consistency all the weirder for its simultaneous overarching sense of structural evacuation. This comes off as quite a conscious tactic, rather like Gastr del Sol in some ways, and like that group’s records, Watch me getting back at the end is intellectual without being cold or clinical, and skeletal without feeling emaciated, offering up more questions than it gives answers. Perhaps the reference to Nico’s birth name, Christa Pfangen, connects the album with another set of songs that have had their center rudely removed: The Marble Index.
By Jon Dale
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Andrea Belfi
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