Linea 77
Horror Vacui

It had been a long time since I wrote a negative review, maybe because I am too kind and only like to review music that I appreciate, but there are cases where the listening experience leaves you so disappointed and horrified that you can't remain indifferent. "Horror vacui" is the fifth studio album by the Turin-based band Linea 77, a group blessed with luck when in the distant 1999, they managed to sign with an excellent record label ("Earache") and thus publish their first album "Too Much Happiness..." (a fairly flat record but still impactful).

Linea 77 at the time represented a great promise for Italian metal, and the second album, "Ketchup Suicide" from 2001, had given everyone high hopes with its excellent mix of Nu/Metal, Hardcore, and melody. Unfortunately, the positive episodes of "Ketchup Suicide" were just false alarms since the band, instead of evolving and improving their sound with subsequent albums, did exactly the opposite, making it as commercial and trivial as possible.

Indeed, "trivial" is the first word that comes to mind when listening to "Horror vacui," all songs are the same and boring, even more flattened by a production almost like that of an Italian pop album that greatly detracts from the tracks, diminishing all their grit. The opener "The Sharp Sound Of Blades" and the first single "Il mostro" are perhaps the only half-decent tracks on the album, particularly the latter, where the usual riff harking back to the famous "Fantasma (of the genre "it went great for us once, let's recycle the guitar loop in all possible ways, so rotation on MTV and sales are guaranteed") and the usual very catchy chorus alternate at least a pretty good final part that makes "Il mostro" an overall pleasant and well-constructed song.

All the remaining tracks are poor copies of the two I mentioned earlier (since the original already excelled) and from these, one denotes the very poor creativity and compositional vein of the band. If you know bands like Korn, System of a Down, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and early Lost Prophets (a band they also toured with), you'll have a good laugh listening, as the guitar riffs and vocal solutions are literally copied from the aforementioned groups.

In this sense, the song "Grotesque" stands out, practically identical to "Byoyb" by System of a Down (if I were them, I would sue for plagiarism). Among the worst also stands out the duet with Tiziano Ferro "Sogni Risplendono," a terrible song made just for MTV, where our guys manage to be worse than Tiziano, at least he has a nice voice. I conclude by quoting one of their songs, if this really is "La nuova musica italiana," then we are indeed in bad shape.