Lleroy
Dissipatio HC

The cover is by Thomas Ott, and what Thomas Ott generally does is scratch away white lines from the black. Outside the lines and inside the lines remains the black. From the black outside and inside, squeezed, thin, the lines describe figurative geographies of evil. Like this vaguely Nazi one-eyed figure, with a collar, Spartan, looking at a point far beyond your left shoulder.

The urgent words of Lleroy, their convulsive rhythmic dynamics, the guitars clashing with tonality, are positioned like those squeezed lines between a black outside and their black inside. If the black outside is Bologna, a non-place with water up to the neck, forced gentrification, and loss of Aura, then take Lleroy’s words and put them outside Pazienza’s balloons, in that space on the page where Pazienza throws all the urgency of text. And also put them - to make it clearer - in that phase of creativity from a band in a little room needing non-definitive words to sketch vocal lines: the phase the Verdena never surpass.

The words and everything else are not the black inside, because the black inside can’t be explained and listening to an album is not a psychoanalytic session. The words and everything else are lines.
If you have the black inside, then along the lines, you perceive the compression, and perceiving the compression is perceiving the weight. If you don’t have it, you just hear a somewhat strange rock’n roll, sung in Italian, boring in the long run.
Instead, you have the black outside, no ifs. It doesn’t matter if it’s Bologna. If you think you don’t have the black outside, you’re blind, deaf, insensitive (in the sense of lacking tact), cold (in the sense of chronic sinusitis). If you’re insensitive to the black outside, you blissfully enjoy what the regime passes on, and you don't even reach Lleroy.

Without fear of exaggerating, on a page much less cryptic and more contextualizing than this, m.c. says that Dissipatio HC is «for Lleroy, the leap forward which is equivalent to the difference between Lungs and Atomizer, Land Speed Record and Zen Arcade (or, in another sense, between Rocket To Russia and End Of The Century)»; and I specify with the difference that happens between Drive Like Jehu and Yank Crime, rather.

There are people who are not afraid of sludge, of arpeggios, of mathematics, who don’t even consider whether the riff has been heard before or not.