Crocchie
Crocchie

You are weak, bored with your winter and numbed city, you find yourself barefoot and demotivated with every move, the swarming outside the window is a metropolitan noise drum that crumples you up. You are bunkered for no will. Do you react? NO: you delight in a fine cinematic salad. You don't feel like being intellectual, the various Fellini, De Sica, Germi, you're allergic to every important sociological aspect and every great blah blah blah blah: YOU want the bastard and son of a bitch gangsters, you want the Pulp and you want the blood and you want the dead and you want your heart to beat, you want it to beat more than prostitutes tormented by a greedy pimp at midnight. Italian pulp 70: my home. The passion for films such as "Milano odia: la polizia non può sparare" or "Roma a mano armata" I expressed on a specific forum about a year ago: there I communicated for the first time with Ruggero Diella (known to friends as Milian), a fanatic of the genre. Don't know him? Of course, he is nothing, he has no name, he doesn't count for shit in any famous environment, like most of us, his voice is a child's moan that crashes. I take the contact on Msn and one night:

Ruggero "Milian" Diella  "Henry Silva, Mario Adorf, Maurizio Merli, and Tomas Milian are actors who have NOTHING to envy from their American cousins. And then the music, the soundtracks of the 70s, Ennio Morricone working on Dario Argento's movies... the magnificent basses of poliziotteschi. One of our songs vaguely reminds me..."

Sanjuro "One of your songs?!?!"

Ruggero "Milian" Diella  "Yes, I have a band here in Palermo. We've only made one LP that has the same title as the band's name, if I tell you, you'll laugh."

Sanjuro  "Come on, do you think I’ll laugh? I’ve never laughed at anything you’ve said (no offense, in a good way)"

Ruggero "Milian" Diella  "We're a Trio and we're called: Crocchie"

Sanjuro  "AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA, but why!?!?!?!?!?!?!"

Ruggero "Milian" Diella  "Thanks for the non-laughter, if you tell me you're laughing is it stuff for the Mercalli scale???... Crocchie are those typical women’s hairstyles consisting of a ball of hair, symbol of compactness, depth, and warmth. We wanted our music to communicate this"

Sanjuro "Ahh yes my ex used to do her hair like that, so I associated that way of styling with stupidity, a pain in the ass and sorry I have a headache, we'll do it next time"

Ruggero "Milian" Diella "AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAAHHAH you're an idiot"

Crocchie is a Trio from Palermo featuring Ruggero Diella on Vocals/Bass, Gaetano Russo on drums, and Mara Mariani on Vocals/Guitar. They are not a niche group, they are less than that: a couple of crumb-like performances in minor venues, no website, impossibility to obtain their only product. Thanks to the friendship with Ruggero, I managed to get Crocchie via mail (the price of the CD was around 12 euros), even though the initial 200 copies produced are currently sold out. As soon as I finished listening to the album for the first time, I got the chills, I knew, I KNEW I was holding a jewel. A raw jewel, poorly recorded smelling of a minor bootleg, but a jewel. Submerged in a sea of amorphous oysters, this album is the one that contains the pearl. Mix of Post-Rock, Grunge, Hardcore, Songwriting, and Experimental, a sonic banquet of assorted de-genres in a carnivalesque and lucid way. The songs included are 8, let's take a look at them one by one:

1) "Eleonora": Psychotic bass riff, a deliciously noise-rock guitar, often Beefhartian screams and everything progresses with rare fluidity for a peninsular band. Then the riff falls asleep to make way for a miniature funeral march. Excellent tempo change. Around 2:30 minutes the avant-garde component explodes: hellish and suggestive noise obtained with mixed pasta shaken with meows, then it's the turn of an advertisement for a body-toning product, and finally a no-sense bagpipe. Truly impressive.

2) "Scarafaggi Del Mattino": More traditional setting, strong grunge influences, engaging and heavy riff. A certain B-movie component is starting to be noticed, Mara screams "He has a tied wife/ who stuffs biscuits/ Remember: they have the Day TV/ We have the Night TV". Cryptic text but in my opinion, both genius and existentialist at the same time.

3) "Carie": it starts with an oriental-sounding bass line and Mara's strangled poetry sets in "You tell me we'll explore the overflowing of the rainbow/ You tell me we'll explore the scream at midnight/ Then you turn and treat our hearts/ As if they were two defective magnets" after defective a deafening white noise begins (created on the computer), then a crazy piano sound bed on which a drill rattles at different intervals and in the background, there are female moans taken from some erotic channel via cable. Then a funeral march. The impressionist tale of an important love story where initial hope, sex and pain are mixed.

4) "Samsa": It is taken from the Kafkaesque novel. Grunge influence noisy, psychotic. It talks about Gaetano's maniacal difficulty in making himself seen and heard by the neighborhood, almost closed in a sort of phobia due to the conditioning of those who are able to perceive him in the home environment. A minor manifesto of introversion.

5) "Crocchie": The song that gives the album its name is a fusion of hard-core, shamanic tribalisms, and nursery rhymes for children.

6) "Il Viola": It is a remarkable piece of Post-rock descending from the school of Gastr Del Sol, Polvo, For Carnation. Slowness and communicativeness.

7) "I Dettagli": And we have reached one of the gems of the album. "I Dettagli" is a recited poem that boasts a text of enormous value, composed and interpreted by Ruggero Diella "Do you remember when he became the big piece of the matryoshka and I the skinny and last pawn contained in the belly of the belly of the belly of the belly of the belly of the belly of the belly of the belly? Do you remember what we were before this chalk composition shocked by the rain?" It recalls Burroughs’ Dead City Radio... Mara’s hallucinated noise music underneath and a dying drum. Beautiful beautiful beautiful.

8)"Cotone": The longest track, about 9 minutes between mini Sicilian folk, noise, post-rock, and noise-making. Song form bye-bye.

Le Crocchie take their leave, a high and rocky potential of imagination, faulty technique but the ideas prevail and little or nothing is noticeable: transmission of emotions and ideas. Bye Bye beautiful Palermo Crocchie.