Afterhours, Khyber Pass, Philadelphia, March 28th, 2007*
BY SIMONE SECCI FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT First thing to say, the Afterhours that I know and I saw playing live in Italy a couple of times, look very different from the band I saw tonight at the Khyber. For obvious reasons, because the crowd and the hype around them here are of very different proportions and also because their sound and live show was really different. Maybe cause of the influence of Twilight Singers leader’s Greg Dulli, maybe because of a new direction of the band, but tonight they rocked. Hard and loud and the people that besides few Italians never heard them before liked it, they really did. Of course they are not the newest sensation in the music scene and they never wanted to be, but they played their songs straight to the audience, even surprising the people with a couple of really funny performances, one of them, a chamber pop music song John Cale’s style, including just keyboards, sax and violin was really entertaining. That was enough for the people here to appreciate them and make them appear to me that i know the band since a pretty long time ago, really renewed, far from the standard of Italian songwriting meet grunge and wave, in which they have been categorized in Italy from the nineties, ever since.
*Afterhours is “Italy’s biggest rock band,” according to their publicist. Greg Dulli produced their new album. Simone is from Italy. English is his second language. He doesn’t always use it the ‘right’ way, but he always gets where he wants to go.