Jennifer Gentle

Although once a band, Jennifer Gentle is now whittled down to just one man, Marco Fasolo, a former ice cream salesman from the provincial north Italian town of Padova who, in his spare time, records in his basement on cobbled-together equipment. So far in his career Marco has made five albums, each of which sounds more like Syd Barrett lost and drunk in a 1930s Berlin fairground than the last – swirls of organ, time signatures that refuse to sit still and vocals which switch between the settings marked ‘choirboy’ and ‘a thousand choirboys being threatened with knives in a graveyard’. Indeed, certain parts of ‘The Midnight Room’ are so creepy that if the neighbours found out what Fasolo was doing in his basement they’d probably lynch him. Let’s pray that they never do if the result is albums as excitingly unhinged as this.

Michael Lane