Summer Fiction: Can You Feel Nostalgic For Something You Never Knew? -by Alyson Camus

Bill Ricchini hasn’t known the 60’s since he was born in 74, but the debut album ‘Summer Fiction’ from his new band of the same name undoubtedly carries a heavy dose of nostalgia of this period, as well as many other elements that could make you eager to watch old black and white European movies again.

The eleven songs of ‘Summer Fiction’, which will be released on December 1st, are as varied as they are consistent, composing this intimate world, this updated cinematic score of a lost movie from Fellini or,… Bellocchio. The music video for ‘Chandeliers’ actually uses an excerpt from Bellocchio’s 1965 movie ‘Fists in the pocket’ and fits so well to the movie it is impressive.

I read on the official website of the band that ‘the album loosely follows a young girl’s coming of age but reads like the journal entries of the guys who fall for her throughout her life.’
The album opener ‘She’s bound to get hurt’ has this familiar sweet the-Beach-Boys-meet Belle-and-Sebastian sound, with bright vocal harmonies, and riffs which can soothe you like only good pop songs can do.

‘Chandeliers’, with its rhythm that seems borrowed from the 60’s, and its lush vocal harmonies, has this subtle and complex to achieve faculty to make you happy and sad at the same time, like an upbeat song that hides its own inward little tragedy.

The instrumentals ‘Diamond Beach’, ‘Waltz (Summer fade)’ and ‘Lipstick traces’ bring back the album to this cinematic imagery, with languished trumpets, nostalgic and glowing keyboards or drunken horns, a little Jon Brion-esque at times, but who still composes waltzes?

However, there is more than this 60’s sound, there are also songs like ‘Kids in Catalina’, or ‘Carry on’ which open towards more exotic horizons, as if George Harrison had been influenced by some exotic island sound. Strangely these songs reminds me about Nil Lara, who released an album in the mid 90’s and was mixing Cuban music with American rock’ n roll, although this does not help because nobody has probably ever heard of him! But there is definitively something colorful in these tunes which held a tasteful idea from some distant island.

‘Throw your arms around me’ has a little bit of many things, the song flows with its rich string and keyboard harmonies over a bouncing guitar loop, like a sweeter side of ‘Stand by me’ by John Lennon at times.

Summer Fiction reminds many things and produces something new at the same time, it has summer in the title and is released just before winter, an opposition that parallels all the songs, unleashing a comforting sadness hidden behind a sunny and happy summer day.

Bill Ricchini, who had previously recorded two albums ‘Ordinary Time’ and ‘Tonight I burn brightly’ on his own, self-produced ‘Summer Fiction’ and recorded most of it in his South Philadelphia home.