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Rating: The Biko is a small ARCI club that hosts nice concerts, run by people who unfortunately don't shine either for friendliness or for manifest honesty. Not that they are dishonest, but three times, at three in the morning, they tried to make me pay the entrance fee because people had played that night (HAD PLAYED).
Live, I've only seen Calibro so far. Twice. With concerts, the place is very intimate, the walls drip with sweat, someone is constantly touching your butt, you're always pressed against the buttocks of the person in front of you, if you move a foot you step on four others, etc. With Calibro...
Yesterday no, yesterday was different.
At the entrance, the not-so-friendly managers ask me for money because people still have to play, and for once, it seems that they are right. Inside it's semi-empty: the Bachi are not Calibro, the proposal is more "extreme" (even if before, until 2010, despite the hidden and not flaunted noise, it was much more so) the sounds less catchy, and to finish listening to them you have to be a listener who works harder than a shovel to unearth Necroide rather than S.P.A.C.E.
It's a bit of a shame because the muscular sweat and pheromones stuck to the cement of the four walls that hold up the roof suit the proposal of Bruno Dorella and Giovanni Succi better than the nostalgic cop combo. But you adapt, and after all, come on: it was known it would be like this.
To compensate for the absence of intimate home smells and vapors, I start writing this stuff with hands that smell like onions. An onion soup at the end of the concert would have been divine yesterday.
Slowly I believe we start to be more than thirty inside. Then forty. Then if all goes well maybe we reach about a hundred (more or less, but let's make it a round number because maybe it's just me miscounting at a glance).
Twenty minutes late and the lights are dimmed in the room and on stage the two anthropomorphic insects climb up. Dorella grips the sticks of his bassless drum kit, Succi grabs the devil and they start.
And it must be the second song, or maybe even the first, the fact is that I get lost in the lyrics of "Black Metal il Mio Folk" and fifty curses and saints start, which now twelve hours later, I think they stopped at a rest area to enjoy a peaceful moment.
It's not the first time that Black Metal il Mio Folk makes them start, let's say they start every time I hear it, which makes it quicker.
The new work of the Bachi has been labeled as "light", "ironic", not taking itself seriously.
Now, the lyrics of the opening track of the album say:
"Those were simple times
and you called them gloomy and catastrophic
only if less secure,
but security had already been dead for some time;
you expect paradise and always get hell.
A lineage spoiled by a whim of fate,
you kept this specter away for seventy years
but even fate has its irony
and now you know what a gloomy catastrophe is.
Now you have hell in your face, no longer distant and foreign,
now you have the apocalypse in the square, you've had your real war.
Now it's your land
that tears itself apart,
now it's your house
that devastates,
now it's your people being mowed down,
now it's your head being cut off.
The beginning of the end is a real scenario,
house by house in all streets,
how brutal falls
the lord's cleaver
no matter which.
Black Metal my folk.
Defend the name of rock 'n' roll."
Now, damn Hendrix (that maybe that "damn Hendrix" opens your eyes) tell me whatever you want, but not that it's lyrics that don't take themselves seriously, that it's light lyrics, that it's ironic nonsense to have a laugh. Or do, but then shove those Francophile avatars at the bottom of the absence of critical spirit that you carry around flaunting with extreme pride. For the record: two plus two always equals four. And rock & roll is God, at least here. Here in the lyrics, because here with us the god is known even to children, it's the money- And if someone still hasn't understood, they should keep quiet or else my depression will rise.
Thank you, close parenthesis.
The concert proceeds with the presentation of the new work, some tracks from Quintale, and that Habemus Baco from the eponymous EP which more or less I think represents a self-congratulatory exaltation of the stylistic shift the group took with the last record. A proposal that continues to remain faithful to the melodically cacophonous origins of the beginnings, but adds three or four spades more of noise and speed. They make considerable noise (actually an impossible racket considering they are two on stage) and spit their soul to keep up with the times and the voice volumes they have chosen. At the end of the concert, they take 5 minutes to catch their breath and grant four encores. Very sweaty. The encores. We less so, we are a bit cold, it's just that someone like Giovanni is intimidating despite the friendliness he communicates between one angry face and another. After all, certain things if you sing them with a smile on your face it ends up that people burp at you. (oh no, people laugh as well, ironic lyrics...)
Angrily friendly but never over the top. He closes the concert with a nice phrase, so nice it seems sincere: "I thank each one of you, each-one-of-you, for coming this evening. Thank you"
I didn't sing a song but my hands hurt, and I keep clapping. Not the music this time but the humility.
The entire "Non Io" is left off the setlist. And so is "Casa di Legno" and it breaks my heart.
I am convinced that the less metal and more personal proposal they presented with the first four albums was even better than what they've done in the last 5 years and that "Casa di Legno" is the best song they have ever written. Yet Giovanni says that many share that opinion, and in reality since "Quarzo" to today the audience at his concerts has multiplied tenfold, "we used to play for 30 people, most of whom chatted during the concert". Incidentally, I wasn't there at their concerts back then... So maybe I like to say that weird, strange, at once limping and mid-distance running champion album, was my favorite because, come on, you look a bit like a stickler if you bring up "Non io", but the truth is that, behind the intellectual-artistic patina we wear, we all hide the same hunger for noise and blows. And so, between these four concrete walls that will never burn, that might never even fill with sweat, that won't smell as they should, whether it's folk or folk black metal.
And then, onions for all.
Oh, I whisper it secretly, in italics, otherwise Giovanni gets upset (and he's got arms as big as my thighs) but I say it: "Non Io" kicks the ass of 3/4 of the albums you've purchased in the last 10 years, if you don't know it yet, hurry up and catch up
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