“Do You Ever Think?”

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter

Jul 31, 2025

Is Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter Fortunato Durutti Marinetti’s most direct record yet, or his most elusive? It’s hard to say, given how the record plays itself out like an emotional palindrome, its title suggesting listeners will find comfort in familiar sounds at first but will ultimately end up with a sour taste in their mouth (and they’ll like it).

Then there is the whole matter of just who Fortunato Durutti Marinetti is. Is he the “Toronto-via-Turin cantautore” responsible for a string of “poetic jazz rock” albums, including 2020’s Desire, Memory's Fool from 2022, and his 2023 release, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean? Or is he musician and songwriter Daniel Colussi, a stalwart of the Canadian indie music scene for years, both as a solo musician and with his bands the Shilohs and the Pinc Lincolns?

Colussi is Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, and Marinetti is Daniel Colussi, of course, and Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter isn’t going to resolve that identity loop anytime soon. Instead, it leans into its exploration of dualities right down to its mirrored title and its split-label release (We Are Time handling the North American version, Quindi Records taking care of Europe). The same record, twice. Almost.

It’s challenging to unravel the artist from the art when the two are as intertwined as Colussi is with Marinetti, but that is ultimately the point of making music, is it not: to blur the boundaries between persona and person, between what’s revealed and what remains obscured. Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter lives in that blur, and it does so with opulence and commitment —a “dive into excess,” as described in its release notes.

Colussi’s collaborators are an ensemble of soft-focus assassins who saturate his songs with sax, strings, synths, percussion, and euphonium that move through the arrangements like gentle, shifting weather, giving the songs colour and contour without overpowering them. The music becomes the heavy, pleated, velvet drapes enveloping Colussi’s colossus of a baritone, his timbre crisp like a freshly cracked knuckle, his tone raspy and worn like weathered hands.

If it all sounds a bit much—the heavy drapes, the cracked knuckles, the soft-focus assassins— that’s because it is. Deliberately so. Colussi is intentionally pushing his songwriting “to absurdist extremes,” and he lands there with complete conviction. Not by turning everything up to full blast, but by digging deeper into the quiet human dramas of his songs.

Colussi’s voice and vocal style are often compared to those of Dan Bejar of Destroyer. While Colussi thoroughly acknowledges the similarities he shares with his namesake, there is a distinct difference between the two. Colussi’s sing-speak style is more guttural, like the words are catching in his throat as he says them. When he breaks out into singing midway through the opening track “Full of Fire,” Colussi switches gears to an impassioned lounge singer who's got a story to tell, but you have to lean in close to hear it. The funky Rhodes on “Beware” finds Colussi shifting style, sounding something like a gangster offering up a litany of warnings with a chewed-up cigar stub between his teeth. It’s lovely and endearing, and when vocalist Victoria Cheong (aka New Chance) duets with Colussi on the later half of the track, we get further insight into the duality at play on the album: “Be cautious, too much closeness can be dangerous / But too much distance is also a risk / And be careful of too much contradiction / and remember, accidents happen when you’re not paying attention.”

Lead single, “A Perfect Pair,” is the closest Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter’s seven songs and two instrumentals come to having a classic pop song structure. That it’s followed in the running order sequence by “A Rambling Prayer,” the album’s longest and most stream-of-conscious track, only makes sense because Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter is constantly folding one feeling into its opposite. The album basks in the tension between its polished musical tones and the murky fog of Colussi’s memory poem lyrics. Duality is not just the theme of Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter; it shapes the whole record, looping Colussi’s detached delivery with the intimacy of his arrangements, highlighting the absurdity and precision of it all.

The conceit all comes to a head on the head-scratchingly meta“Call Me the Arthur,” where Colussi nonchalantly instructs listeners to make what they will of Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter: “Call this a story / Call it comedy or tragedy / Autobiography or fantasy / Bad poetry… call it anything you want.” He goes on to identify as a dog that refuses to bark, a bird afraid of the sky, and suggests listeners can call him a “dirty bird” (if they so choose). There’s also the story of failing to secure a role that was written for him, likely because Colussi is “a screw that wouldn’t fit / a mirror that did not reflect,” and “a fly drowning in this ointment.”

Absurd? Without a doubt. Purposely? Perhaps, but the crazy thing is: it works. For all his lyrical follies and foibles, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti feels authentically at home as the awkward outsider slipping through these immaculately arranged songs. It all sounds so natural, so right: sweet turns bitter, bitter turns sweet, and around it goes again. And you go right around with him, happily and willingly, drowning in the ointment right alongside him.

the act of just hearing [t]here 🎧

a little more [t]here [t]here 🪩

Not quite the main act, but still on the stage.

As I suggest above (or maybe I didn’t?), I’ve been a fan and follower of Dan Collusi’s music for quite some time and have reviewed a number of his releases for DOMINIONATED over the years.

It started with a review of Joy to the World, from the Pinc Lincolns in 2017: