Death SS
...in Death of Steve Sylvester

Wandering and browsing through the dark corners of Debaser, I stumble upon the Death SS page and say to myself in shock: "Am I dreaming, or are the hairy balls of Silvestri dressed as a satanic figure missing, just as we usually find them on the cover of "...in Death of Steve Sylvester"?" And so, more driven by the need to fill this unforgivable gap than by an actual communicative urgency, I proceed to review the honorable debut of this legendary Italian band.

I won't delve into the history of Death SS, active since the distant 1977 and eventually becoming a true cult band: known by all, worshiped by some, even feared by others (there are not a few who stay away for fear of the bad luck their music is supposed to, according to these geniuses, emit!), but never achieving true success. An injustice, in my opinion, given that the artistic value of the Italian group remains undisputed, evidenced by a distinct personality, uncommon versatility, and a series of truly remarkable works (and I think of "Black Mass," "Heavy Demons," and "Panic"). It's also worth noting that they anticipated the vampire look and horror-fetish suggestions that are popular today thanks to the success of bands like Cradle of Filth.

As for those who have doubts about the two S's that stand out in the band's moniker, I can say they have nothing to do with the SS of the Third Reich, a detail clarified more than once by Paul Chain himself (former guitarist and co-founder of the band with Steve Sylvester), who claims to be a pacifist and declares his music free from any political connotation.

"...in Death of Steve Sylvester" was released in 1985, after unspeakable troubles and the departure of Chain himself, marking the beginning of a new era. The undisputed leader of the band is now Steve Sylvester, and if his raspy voice of a mad demoniac remains the distinctive trademark of the project, the Death SS's "horror music" becomes streamlined, partly shedding its Sabbath reminiscences (the domain of Catena), moving towards a classic heavy style with glam shades and heavily influenced by the scenic and vocal excesses of Alice Cooper. A monolithic sound, which at times seems to border on thrash, but doesn't shy away from melody and atmosphere: keyboards, choirs, bells, and assorted effects are indeed summoned to darken the situation, leading us into the horrifying settings of B-movie horror films.

The scarce and unhealthy sound, finally, while on one hand has the merit of giving everything a more cryptic and unsettling aura, on the other hand it diminishes the valuable work of an ensemble that demonstrates a decent technical preparation from all fronts (the rhythms are powerful, the solos commendable, and the compositions imaginative and rich in time and atmosphere changes).

As for the lyrics, well, we can only draw a veil over them. While they fill their mouths with big words, literary references, and esoteric philosophies (the infamous Crowleyan doctrine of "Do what thou wilt," which is reread from a lazy perspective that sounds more like "do whatever you damn please!"), Silvestri fails to convince us, and deep lyrics like that of "Terror" speak for themselves: "I'm caught in a thunderstorm and I've missed a train, there are no shelters in this place, I'm obliged to take refuge into this old cemetery that seems abandoned." (I mean, let me understand: how does Silvestri think? He misses the train, it's raining, and decides to take shelter precisely in an abandoned cemetery? And where do you seek shelter in a cemetery? Crooked under a headstone? And to think that the maternity rights to this piece were fiercely contested in court by him and Catena in a series of endless legal battles...).

The listening is nevertheless pleasant and smooth. The first side consists of five tracks that serve as a sort of introduction to the band members: "Vampire" (Steve Sylvester), "Death" (Christian Wise, on guitar), "Black Mummy" (Erik Landlen, on bass), "Zombie" (Kurt Templar, on guitar), and "Werewolf" (Boris Hunter, on drums). How charming, right? Of these, the gripping opener "Vampire", destined to become a true classic of the band, stands out without a doubt, especially its breathtaking finale, characterized by an impressive double-bass drum, ultra-melodic guitar solos, and the possessed screams of the mad singer.

The second side, which doesn't follow a precise concept, includes another great classic, the aforementioned "Terror", and a so-called cover of "I Love the Dead" (literally: "I fuck the dead"!) by Alice Cooper. Also noteworthy is the disorienting "The Hanged Ballad", a beautiful and atmospheric acoustic ballad, a nearly ten-minute trip that will inevitably shake you at the end, when you're hit by the sudden cacophonic explosion of choirs, dissonances, drums, and Sylvester's declamatory singing, an intense handful of seconds in which the band's arrogant expressive and iconoclastic force is condensed. Closing with the historical "Murder Angels", the most violent of the batch, is called to seal an album that is still somewhat raw, but not without truly interesting cues.

The strength of Death SS's music ultimately lies in always and anyway being permeated by an underlying morbidity that we will hardly find in classic heavy metal, and even less in Mercyful Fate, to whom Our Own have been often improperly compared (after all, that little siren of King Diamond would never have the balls to be crucified on the cover as will happen in the subsequent, and excellent, I might add, "Black Mass"!). The art of Death SS, in fact, is characterized by a uniquely Italian wickedness, and one can say they stand to Mercyful Fate as our own Mario Bava stands to American director Roger Corman. Take, for example, Bava's "La Maschera Del Demonio" and compare it to Corman's "The Pit and the Pendulum": while the latter remains anchored to the stylistic features of the 19th-century Gothic novel, essentially retracing its mechanisms of tension (at most updating the whole with psychoanalytic elements), our national Marione is able to avoid the clichés of vampire movies, setting up a gloomy atmosphere imbued with an unprecedented attraction to Evil and a perversion and taste for excess that manifests in the insane sadism of certain scenes, such as the torture with the spiked mask that gives the film its title.

Similarly, the music of Death SS (but also the psycho-doom of Violet Theatre by the same Paul Chain, or, going further back, the dark-progressive of Bartoccetti's Jacula and Antonius Rex or Simonetti's Goblin, just to name the most famous ones), despite all the world's limitations, goes on to "shine" with that expressive force and necessity to be excessive and blasphemous typical of a country where there is widespread intolerance towards ecclesiastical authorities and the most bigoted and hypocritical manifestations of Catholic morality. A reaction that could not but occur in a country like Italy, always plagued by excessive Church interference in the cultural, political, and civil life.

In short, take everything away from me, but not the hairy balls of Silvestri dressed as a satanic figure!