Eyes of Fire
Prisons

If there's one thing I love about a site like DeBaser, it's being able to freely shout to the world: "You guys in Italy don't give a damn about this band, you guys in Italy don't review this album, well, rascals, I'll take care of it!", and then spend the next hour feverishly composing my work, imagining a hypothetical statue of myself to place on the Altar of the Fatherland, if only the latter had a little corner dedicated to the heroic deeds of Italian Music Reviewers.

Nonsense aside, I remember discovering this album way back in 2006 after reading a review of it in the dear old Metal Hammer (the only one in Italian I found, and not online anyway). It was the post-adolescence era, the fixation with Neurosis and the barrage of sludge metal, so I approached it convinced I would find something right up my alley. And so it was: as soon as the opener "Blood (This Consumes You)" started, I felt as electrified as a schoolgirl at a One Direction concert, completely captivated by those filthy and heavy sludge riffs (at least for my younger self) that delighted me as if I were an Epicurean philosopher at a Dan Bilzerian party. I listened to that stuff on a loop for at least a month, not sparing wild headbanging on the train while people around me mistook me for a devil-possessed lunatic influenced by both Satan and Maccio Capatonda.

Frankly, I don't understand why these three Californian lads decided to change their old moniker "Shiva" to a much more anonymous "Occhi di fuoco". Moreover, browsing Metal Archives, you discover at least another couple of bands with the same name (that nobody gives a darn about anyway is another story, and it's not like our guys are doing much better). If we also include the eponymous 1983 film and the fact that the band only released one EP and another album before this one ("Ashes To Embers", from 2004) before disappearing into oblivion, I wonder why they chose to shoot themselves in the foot with the name choice, thus condemning themselves to eternal anonymity.

That said, after 11 years, the memory of it suddenly flashed in my mind, and so I went back to listening to it in full, trying to tune my ears to more critical/objective vibrations. And indeed one cannot certainly say "Prisons" is a masterpiece: it's definitely too derivative, unripe, and even a bit naive at some points, with a couple of filler songs, not always catchy riffs, and a general fundamental indecision about "what to play" that leaves it neither fish nor fowl. In which genre to precisely place it? Too close to a song format to be sludge, too raw to be post, too dirty to be alternative.

Why then should an unremarkable album like "Prisons" awaken anyone's interest, given that this band seems to have vanished into the same void from which it emerged? Perhaps, I might answer, it's because deep down fans of the genre need an album like this. They need Mark Fisher's hoarse and scratchy voice, those mystical choirs halfway between Orthodox monks and a group of drunken Manchester United hooligans, those post-metal-influenced riffs that try to reconcile the grime of sludge with the catchy melodies of a certain alternative rock. They need a band like this: a band that, despite being derivative and inspired by all the output of post-Neurosis bands, desperately tries to find its own place in the world, its originality, its trademark.

The heavy riffs and choirs of the already mentioned opener, the passionate unrest of the riffs in "It All Dies Today", as well as the melancholic arpeggios of "True Love" or the catchy chorus of "Dead To The World" indeed confirm just that. And the final suite "Fire Inside", which exceeds 8 minutes, appears as the cry of pain from a group searching for their identity in an inflated music market. It's a shame it's also their swan song, as this album will be the band's last.

If you don't endure sludge and post-metal, feel free to move on; if you don't know what these terms mean, get the Neurosis discography and return after studying; if you grew up on a diet of Minsk, get this album and give it a shot. "Prisons" is a work that has its own artistic dignity: it has the flavor of a missed opportunity, of those albums that miss the target but that "at least tried". For this reason as well, in my opinion, it deserves not to be forgotten.