Audiopile Review: When is pop truly sophisticated? No shade on sophistipop per se acts like The Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout. We love them. But there’s another stratum of sophisticated pop acts where the sheen is often less shiny but the musical and lyrical content is arguably more truly sophisticated. We’re thinking of Kate Bush, Annette Peacock, Scritti Politti, Slapp Happy, Robert Wyatt, and Vancouver’s own Destroyer. “And the godlike Peter Hammill???” Sure, why not. But the name we were really thinking of adding to that list was Italian-Canadian sophisticated pop auteur Dan Colussi aka Fortunato Durutti Marinetti. Over the last five years, Dan has been building a formidable discography of literary lounge pop. And his latest, ‘Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter’, might be his most sophisticated missive yet. Backed by a casually funky band and fleshed out with all manner of strings and horns, this is the perfect album to help you ponder the imponderables while sitting in the sun with a cocktail.

Known on both sides of the Atlantic for his baroque, poetic approach to songwriting, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti returns with Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter – his most sweeping, absurd, and emotionally acute statement to date.

Inspired by the iconoclasts—Annette Peacock, Rickie Lee Jones, Donald Byrd, Brigitte Fontaine, Fabrizio De André—Marinetti follows his craft wherever it leads. There are echoes of Tindersticks, Destroyer, Lambchop, Leonard Cohen and Bill Callahan here, but also something singularly his: Maximally Graceful Funky Eloquence, as he puts it.

The title, Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, nods to Anne Carson’s Eros: The Bittersweet, a book that launches a thousand ideas into the air: the impossibility of translation, the contradictions at the heart of desire, and the fluid spectrum between seeming opposites. That duality animates this album—from its two-headed dog cover art to its songs that twirl between beauty and grotesquerie, euphoria and dread.

While his previous album, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean, sought sonic hybridity, Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter marks Marinetti’s dive into excess. Written with the intent to push his songwriting to absurdist extremes, the album features long, chorus-less compositions swirling in 6/8 time, packed with words, brass, and string flourishes. Recorded live with a nimble six-piece band in a cramped Toronto attic studio, the record captures raw performances—often tracked in first or second takes—and overlays them with meticulous arrangements.

The songs on Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter grapple with empathy, ego, surveillance, spiritual exhaustion, and love in its various shades of delusion. Lead single “Full of Fire” opens the album with an explosive ode to romantic recklessness in the tradition of Thelma & Louise. Elsewhere, “Beware” offers bitter advice for bitter times, “Call Me the Author” references Joan Didion by way of Brigitte Fontaine, and “My Funeral” imagines a self-delivered eulogy set to sombre jazz-noir. The instrumental themes (“Theme I” and “Theme II”) give the band room to stretch, underscoring the record’s musical vitality. The album features contributions from a revolving cast of heavy-hitters, including New Chance (co-vocals on “Beware”) and Jay Arner (clavinet on “Beware”), who also mixed the entire record. A longtime friend and collaborator of Colussi’s, Arner (of Energy Slime, also on We Are Time) brings a deep familiarity to this fourth recorded collaboration, giving Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter its surreal, shimmering final polish.