Sydney’s Metro Theatre is sweating through its own little epoch tonight, because bar italia have rolled into town carrying an album named after a film where Marilyn Monroe and two desperate musicians flee the mob in drag. And honestly, Some Like It Hot feels like exactly the right title for a band who seem to slip into whatever skin, era or emotional temperature the moment demands. Onstage, they’re a three-headed torch—Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, and Sam Fenton—each burning at a different frequency but somehow generating a single incandescent heat.
Wet Kiss set the tone early, delivering a sharp, tightly wound opening set that leans into tension rather than theatrics. Their sound feels raw and deliberate, balancing grit with a cool restraint that holds the room’s attention without overreaching.
The crowd tonight is thick with the denim-clad, the quietly beautiful, the sort of people who look like they were born inside a record sleeve. And bar italia meet them exactly where they want to be met: half aloof, half detonating. They’ve come a long way from the shy, near-spectral presence I saw in that darkened Oxford Art Factory set last year, where they barely acknowledged the room before vanishing into the night. Now, after 160 shows across continents, they walk onstage like a band who know what their name carries. They have muscle. They have swagger.
They open with the kinetic pulse of My Kiss Era hook-laced and head-rush inducing, it’s bar italia doing what only they can: Fehmi and Fenton push the band forward with guitar lines that gleam and snarl, while Nina—ever the quiet assassin—slips between honeyed, deadpan and possessed, hyperkinetic with her red mini skirt twirling.
All that talk of shyness, all those early shows in darkness—they’ve replaced that with a full-body, five-piece presence. Tonight at the Metro, they sound like a band hitting their stride in real time.
Bar Italia will play Brisbane next.
Images and Words Deb Pelser
