Baseball Gregg

A bicycle ride up a muggy August afternoon (Montese). A park bench, still in place ten years after that first kiss (Nevertheless). City lights in the distance, looking like stars in the night (Cilantro Grass). And again, the youthful poems of James Joyce, the unnatural grace of his dancer daughter Lucia's plastic poses (Past Times) and the courage of the very first editor of Ulysses, a masterpiece that a hundred years ago was published by a young queer expat in 1920s Paris (Sylvia Beach).

And while our bodies – like small, dense metropolises – teem with life and desires (Holobiont), between the immaterial and the virtual (OnlyFans), some splinters of the past ripple to the surface. An afternoon game on Sept. 11, 2001 (Olympic White) and summer mornings grappling with photophobia (irl). Echoes of the funeral of a friend who has just taken his own life (Gone Deaf) resonate in a dissonant polyphony with the intrusive thought of pausing an existence (Biology) in which "all of the ways I define me, are all dependent on the greed" (I Don't Wanna Wait and See): frames that are gradually fed into a shredder to "wipe the dust that you used to be" (Shred).

Baseball Gregg release a new diary of twenty songs, written and produced in the spring of 2022 in Bologna. Pastimes is made of stories that simultaneously live in the Past Times, tracing the biography and works of the greatest English-language writer of the twentieth century, and at the same time capable of casting their own shadow in the present, reverberating the anxieties of today and spanning multiple dimensions of sound and storytelling. A narrative arc that unravels between intimate episodes and historical and literary references, personal memories and epiphanies and collective moments, in a fresco that will necessarily prove totalizing and maximalist.

If in the album's first song "better days ahead" are foretold, (Montese) in the album's last track - at the end of a journey lasting more than an hour - these beaux jours finally concretize, materializing, however, in a pacified world, which “spins within and without me”. Literary allegories, from the aforementioned Joyce to Shelley's Frankenstein (Lake Geneva) and small episodes of intimacy, skits recorded in the park with the iPhone (luv 2 b) and tracks arranged with dozens of string overdubs (Better Days): if opposites attract, this album embraces paradox and makes it its own gravitational pull from which it is impossible not to be enraptured.

The duo's most ambitious work to date is a compendium of musical poetics resulting from an eight-year career. A definitive proof of the duo's virtuoso eclecticism between different styles and registers, in a framework of songs as choral and multifaceted as ever. For a group like Baseball Gregg that has always claimed as its stylistic hallmark independence, music interpreted first and foremost as passion and "pastime," and a "do-it-together" attitude, a record titled "Pastimes" instead sees for the first time a lineup ready for the big leap, after a patient underground success testified by millions of online streams and participations in festivals and shows on three continents.

Then again, as the full quote from Joyce's Finnegans Wake goes, "Pastimes are past times."

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«We often say to ourselves, when we are in a time of need, that things will “get better.” It may be a slow and painful process, but eventually the hurt we are feeling will subside. It’s an encouraging notion that births the idea of today as a new beginning, the starting point for our future life. Sometimes this encouragement works well, but only if we can actually believe that things will get better.

Baseball Gregg’s new album "Pastimes" starts with “Montese” and the dubious promise of a new beginning: “Better Days they lie ahead, as I lie on my bed: and all these lies, on my head, as always.” The promise of a better future is no longer believable. It’s a lie we tell ourselves.

Pastimes is a play of contradictions: moments of hope followed immediately with moments of despair. Great authors, famous directors, classic literature, and porn actors. High energy riffs and acoustic interludes. Hate blends with love, ambition with humility, and truth with lies.

The album closes with “Better Days,” fulfilling the promise of “Montese.” The first half of the track reflects on the passage of a 30th birthday, full of regrets at their past selfishness. The coda of this final song, however, finds solace in these mounting contradictions, recognizes the beauty between melody and contrappunto, and adopts the perspective that we ourselves are a small part of the grandiose symphony of nature.»