Music Review // Diane & The Gentile Men "The Bad and the Beautiful"


https://open.spotify.com/album/55iBrdZsnspxqiTod9M5Yc?flow_ctx=fd3fd75e-b6f9-4972-a4a1-493ebd163284%3A1695859903


The music of Diane & The Gentile Men will take you on a rock n roll ride throughout the album "The Bad and the Beautiful".    It all starts with the single "Lace Up Your Sneakers" and then goes into another song about dancing called "Dance Til Dawn".    In this way, I imagine this album as if it were a live performance and as everyone is sitting at tables in the back of the club, as soon as these first two songs hit they're drawn out of their seats, onto the dance floor and closer to the stage.

As Diane Gentile is joined by Alejandro Escovedo on "Walk with Me" I am reminded of Bruce Springsteen and then there are big acoustics coming out on "Fade Away Author".  "Shimmy" is just rocking fun while "Far Away Down the River" leans a little bit more towards folk/country as moonshine is mentioned as well.   "The Hook Up" is a fast paced rock n roll number, borderline on that rockabilly sound, while "Sugarcane" just brings out the blues. 

By the end of this album you will hear a big piano ballad called "Kiss the Sky" and it just overall goes to show the way that the music can slightly shift genres throughout yet stay on the same guided path.  Lyrically, I really enjoy lines like the chorus on "Dance Til Dawn", which says: "All you want to do is dance til dawn and be famous", which is a nice way to think of life.

Ultimately, I feel like the music of Diane & The Gentile Men is close to Americana in the sense that it isn't really threatening or dull, but it is there to rock and that's just what it does.  But even more than that, it has lyrics that you can imagine someone singing in a bar and the patrons of the bar nodding along in not only agreement to the words but to the sounds of the music. 


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