(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Paleface is a singular singer-songwriter who caused a sensation with one album, Paleface (Polydor, 1991), sung (or rather, screamed, as well as badly played) in a style halfway between Neil Young and Billy Bragg. Burn And Rob instead proclaims him a descendant of David Peel and Phil Ochs. She Was Talking To Me even manages to be catchy.

The second album was never released, but his former roommate Beck brought that style to success, softening its gutter-punk intensity.

Raw (Shimmy Disc, 1995) reintroduces the lone man with his guitar, screaming in a half-empty club. The production is that of a low-budget bootleg. The sketches unfold in a tragicomic vein, from the absurd yodeling of Woody Submarine to the martial blues of Hair Of The Dog. But his melancholic philosophy is expressed above all in the long elegies of Better Friends and I Don't Know Why, which bring back the era of Donovan and Eve Of Destruction. Unexpectedly, Monotony is instead an electric blues-rock track with a full backing band. Paleface also allows himself two instrumental interludes: the psychedelic strumming of Reflections and the pastoral Leo Kottke-style solo of Walking On A Country Road.

In the chain that leads from the great Daniel Johnston to the famous Beck, Paleface plays the role of moderating the former’s madness and paving the way for the normalization of the latter.

On Get Off (Sire, 1996), Paleface has by now become the singer and lead guitarist of a real band. His unpolished roar, methodical and nerve-wracking cadences, and scattered atonality within the harmonies effectively stage the lived-in stories of the songs. The character is in fact dominated by unsettling personalities: in State Of Denial one can recognize Maureen Tucker’s pow-wow cadence, Lou Reed’s hypnotic guitar riff, and organ distortions that rhyme with John Cale’s viola; GGFU is the offspring of Captain Beefheart’s cannibalistic blues; I’ll Be Right Back and Oblivious are drunken serenades in the style of Tom Waits; the rap in Your Commercial Sucks borrows from the refrain of I Saw Your Mommy by Suicidal Tendencies; My Fault seems to parody the folk-rock of REM; Smoke and The Tormentor #1 echo the industrial hardcore of Foetus; Don’t You Understand is inspired by the explosive surges of garage rock from thirty years earlier and the hyper-sonic nursery rhymes of the Ramones. Then there are the short, stripped-down tracks, in keeping with the aforementioned anti-folk approach. But on this record they play a supporting role. Paleface is the most brilliant loser of the 1990s, and the more famous Beck still has much to learn from him.

Paleface is also behind the project Just About To Burn, featuring drummer Monica Samalot.

Paleface returned with: Bottlefed (2003), Just About to Burn (2004), Feel Your Mellow (2004), I Just Wanna Play Guitar (2006), The Show Is on the Road (2009), One Big Party (2010), Go Forth (2020), Beyond the Bells (2023).