Erode
Al volga non si arriva

Isn't it strange to go from De André to the Erode, right? More than a question, this is a thought: in the end, who are the Erode? They are, or rather were, a group of very angry young people. Red Lombards beyond imagination: street communists, Lenin's godchildren. The faith that this group poured into their songs is the reason I decided to talk about them: in the era of honesty, civil unions, and the craze for native ownership, I really felt like talking about a belch. The fragrant message enclosed in a warm and noisy bubble of air: here's the great vaffa of the Erode, the Peppone of Italian Oi!: the call to the red flag on the Reichstag, the hatred towards NATO tanks, unknowingly these misfits speak of our history. Ignorant planters of verses, yet visceral commentators of a reality they know well, that of the excluded and especially the exploited.

Erode's punk rock is without mincing words, it has the flavor of total war: the enemies are on the other side of the bridge and to defeat them no prisoners will be taken. All listeners, all those ready to jump under the stage, are warned: those of Al volga non si arriva are thirteen minutes of boundless (red) anger. Europa launches the record with its spectral riff, comparable to the atmospheres of the distant Sodom's Nuclear Winter; stadium chants, didactic invectives, yet a simple sentiment capable of striking the heart, leading to much deeper reflections than those spat out by the Erode in their piece. We are faced with rivers of alcohol and out-of-control hormones, yet using these primitive means, Lenin's godchildren bring punk back to its origins, to the essence of what it was born for. With the same spirit, we arrive at Stalingrado:

We have endured this long winter
The hunger, the snow, was their hell
Comrade Timoshenko remembers who fell
For the red flag, for the proletariat ​

The insistence on the term proletariat fills the void left by a society where proletarians don't exist, yet they are the majority of the population. Also for this reason, Stalingrado is an ecstasy: not the subtle one sung by the Stormy Six twenty years earlier, we are still in front of a catharsis, but it’s not dictated by violins, it's launched by guitars that leave streams of blood on the ground. The closure of the album is entrusted to Frana, without a doubt the most candid belch of the Erode. The S'i fosse foco sketched by an Angiolieri seeking a clash with the emperors of the moment: a new bucolic catharsis, so furious as to make even a mockery enjoyable, one that needs to be sung at the stadium. And so the thrust of the young Lombards ends; precisely this rage, this red color emanating from a stabbed heart, is what I would like to hear again animating entire generations lost in the dark - the darkness of refined books, ironed clothes, that of songs cleansed by a vocoder. Ode to the Erode and to the putrid germ of the proletariat.

If there must be violence, let it be violence, but let it be against the police
The curve collapses, collapses on the Italian police
The curve collapses, collapses on those sons of bitches