Arctic Plateau
On a Sad Sunny Day

It could have been done better. But, above all, it should have been done. It should have been done because even the spirit needs to suffer from frostbite to decipher many situations. It could have been done better because, clearly, this album delves into the most personal realm, permeated by years of gestation during which listens and thoughts were creatively reworked and determined to be told, albeit selfishly. But you did well, Divirgilio, you did well because you had this album tucked away somewhere inside you, and from these interstices you brought it to light in a cold world, filling it with all those experiential pieces necessary to proclaim your self.

This listen is a particular case. I believe it cannot leave anyone completely indifferent. Although it doesn't delight anvils and hammers greedy for misanthropic novelties, there is such a distinct imprint, there is a passion for one’s art, as if it were chiseled by an Italian master of marble from ancient times. This post-rock monolith with a hint of shoegaze sounds Italian in its intentions more than in its form. It sounds full of passion, it sounds of inner drama romanticized in the Italian way. It plays for my ears and takes on the traits of a still and calm epicenter around which everything is moved by subterranean forces that love to remain hidden, making the appearances shudder. It is a detachment full of love for music, for the guitar, and a love forced into a cold exile amidst questions without answers.

It is an album saturated with melodies that, while limping in flight, know how to reaffirm themselves when they land, demonstrating a certain familiarity with musical and geographical territories similar to those of Iceland. But do not think of the lightness of Sigur Ros. On A Sad Sunny Day knows the acrimonies and darkness of metal, as well as the cacophonic and expansive silence of Northern Europe and it gives something to both: to the former, the weak but picturesque spoken parts (in one case even with that typical '90s scream from our local gothic metal records), to the latter an international frontier spirit. The work remains suspended in a personal style with great poetic emphasis and with well-defined boundaries within which Divirgilio & Co. bear magnificent witness to themselves.

It is not exactly a shoegaze album (there is a track that seeks to contradict me called Iceberg Shoegaze) because it is a music that has limits (not character-wise) and a well-defined range of action. There aren’t too many blurred contours or vaporous lines. Instead, there is a great hybridization work between Novembre and Mogwai, to make myself clear, which manifests solidity and concreteness in the sound on one side and makes pains cosmic on the other. The flaw is that there is too much emotion inside, too much urgency to say everything so that at times it seems that there is confusion not always kept in check in this expressive zeal. But this does not cost much in the judgment of the album. Chapeau, as Fursy Teyssier, a fan of the Roman band and leader of Les Discrets, would say. Not a small achievement.