Deviate Damaen
Just Dead Applause...!

Deviate Damaen: a dark multimedia project from the capital with a particular predilection for music and monologues. A shocking project and, in a way, terribly irreverent. Deviate Damaen (formerly Deviate Ladies), a name that still echoes in the ranks of the Roman underground, although it has been abandoned by its own founders. The minds that animated this combo were those of A.G. Volgar and Don Alexio Bravmord, a Lefebvrian priest. Yes, you read that right! A Catholic and anti-conciliar priest, surrounded by metalheads and goths.

What was such a figure doing in the company of "modernist" long-haired black-clad individuals? Don't ask me and, if you want a piece of friendly advice, don't ask too many questions.

What I know is that this project always had the flavor of a colossal yet successful provocation.

Take, for instance, this "Just A Dead Applause...!". It is not a record available in stores and perhaps it's not even a record in the most common sense of the term. Gothic-dark sound phrases, electro, metal and punk. Mad shards alongside declamatory monologues and samples of various kinds. The meaning of all this? To provoke, scandalize, disgust, and astonish. But who is a record like this aimed at? At everyone and, at the same time, at few. The record, in fact, is entirely downloadable from the band's website (thus accessible even by the most distracted internet surfers), yet it seems to have been produced for a select elite. The favorite targets of Deviate Damaen are as follows: the so-called world of culture, the conformist circuit of majors and indie labels, benevolence, politically correct ideology, and the arrogance of academic charlatans. Reject the chatter of these gray individuals to build a circle of free thinkers. This seems to be the ambitious goal of the album.

A record (?) recorded live inside a deconsecrated church but devoid of spectators. A delirious sonic chaos, "blob-like", visionary, and foreign to any codifiable scheme. A tool perhaps designed to attack the aforementioned categories and to awaken a bit of healthy critical spirit in the more perceptive minds.

Personally, I find such invectives quite shareable. It is not possible, in fact, to hang on every word of spineless people animated by a symbolic imagination built solely to mask their own weaknesses (but at our expense!). It is not possible, in fact, to consider every whim emitted by verbose and sclerotic university professors as the "word of God," just as it is not possible to disdain entire music genres because "Il Mucchio" or "Rumore" tells us so. This "intellectualistic" conformism actually resembles that typical of authoritarian regimes. The difference? You don't end up in jail if you think differently from "their honors"! But, in any case, you are kindly marginalized by "their honors," you are kindly labeled as backward and ignorant, you are considered as a subject to be re-educated and redeemed through the "good press" and "culture that counts". Creeping intolerance covered by thick beards, Lacoste sweatshirts, vacant stares, cute glasses, and a lot of fake-democratic rhetoric.

I know, I might seem like a huge admirer of Deviate Damaen and someone might accuse me of being a former member of the band! I don't rule it out! The fact, however, is that despite these sad yet true considerations, I find very little in the band's philosophy and proposal to be shareable. Deviate Damaen, in fact, seem to wholeheartedly advocate a "differentialist" vision, a vision based on the assumption of "healthy and natural inequalities" and, therefore, a vision absolutely hostile to egalitarianism and solidarity. They, therefore, seem to despise everything with "social" implications and tell us not to love what differs from Italian culture (especially if of Levantine origin). This, in my opinion, is the great and incapacitating limit of the band. Despite the legitimate "anti-intellectualistic" invectives, I find it difficult to understand the reasons for such a harsh challenge against democratic principles (which, even before ours, are merrily trampled on by many fake "progressive" Italians!). This point of view of theirs, along with other statements with a "supremacist" flavor, makes the remaining 50% of the concept indigestible.

Musically speaking, as already written, there is very little to describe. A damn situationalist sonic mortar, insane and anarchic. A sound born of the gothic masses of Sisters Of Mercy and Fields Of The Nephilim but also of certain apocalyptic metal. All arranged in a schizoid and rather unusual manner.

I will not give a rating to this record. I won't because, in all honesty, I don't really know how to judge it. But is it possible to define this work as a record? The answer is yours. In any case: to hell with the circuit of talkers and little critics that our guys, with nonchalance, managed to dismantle.