Is It Time To Fly? Diplomatics

Fans of Swedish bands like The Hives, The Plan and other punky rock bands with a European sauce over them can run to the (digital) record shops. Italian band Diplomatics delivers the goods here. Rock and roll indeed.

I was attracted to Diplomatics because of the single 'Jungle'. The album's opening track is fairly different from the rest of Is It Time To Fly? The Brazilian and all other influences, see the singles section of Week 1, are totally not present in the other songs, although Eduardo Brunello returns on saxophone at the end of the album, to give a The Rolling Stones like ending to 'Dancing All Alone' like you can find on e.g. 'Sticky Fingers'; on steroids that is.

'Jungle' is an amazing song. It is like riding a rollercoaster in the dark. Anything can happen and nothing is warning you for any of it. Hearing is believing in this case.

Promo photo: Matteo Leonardi

Is It Time To Fly? is a full-fledged punkrock album of the kind that often comes out of Sweden. The music is unpolished and rough at the edges. With a singer with a nice rasp on his voice, duo guitar duties spicing up the sound, all with a rock solid rhythm section. The feature standing out most is the harmonica played by singer Danny. He's totally on fire alright. The contrast with his contribution on 'Jungle' couldn't be more different. The rocking version of Talking Heads explores all sorts of directions, where the rest of the album is far more uniform. Highly danceable, rocking and punking. For this reason a harmonica is not the instrument I came to expect to hear. It is a very strong feature of Is It Time To Fly?.

Next to that, the fact that the album may be more uniform is irrelevant for another reason as well. Diplomatics manages to capture all the energy it must have when playing live on its third album. There's no doubt about the motivation and intention of why Diplomatics is in music. The songs show it all, in abundance. Is It Time To Fly? has it all. And, Diplomatics is so much better than The Hives ever was.

Wout de Natris

You can listen to and order Is It Time To Fly? here:

https://godownrecords.bandcamp.com/album/is-it-time-to-fly