Neurosis
Souls at Zero

Ladies and gentlemen, I've just turned 26, and we're about to celebrate another white Christmas amidst gifts, amusements, and well-wishes... everyone claims to feel kinder during this period... all nonsense, don't believe anyone still bombarding you with the same spiel, especially if their words are spoken into a microphone, in front of a camera. Moreover, truth doesn't pay off, especially with girls... the other day I met this girl, eyes so blue I almost drowned in them, great figure, tall, youthful (19 years old)... we arranged to meet the same evening in a local disco; I went there, alone; it was with her I wanted to be. When we met, she warmly hugged me, and when I said, "It's my birthday!", she hugged me tighter and gave me a kiss, then asked, "How old are you turning?" "Twenty-six!" I told her... a bit surprised, she composed herself and asked if I wanted a drink; I said yes, and she told me:"wait for me here... I'll get the drinks!". A bit reluctant, I agreed, wanting to go with her... I watched her blend into the general mayhem of tipsy, excited fifteen-year-olds celebrating Punkreas performing on stage. She never came back. More beaten than a stray dog, and filled with misogynistic rage close to wishing the extinction of the female gender, I made my way to my means of transport, cold, detached, hurt... I locked myself inside, clutching a cigarette... how much I wished to indulge in some marijuana, I desperately needed it to patch up this inner blow... too bad I had a drug test for my driver's license, I couldn't afford to deviate. The only option was to dust off Souls at Zero, I thought... indeed... Souls at Zero, the music of pain, just to quote Piero Scaruffi, and the review he wrote back in 1992 in Rockerilla #146, of which I keep a copy dearly... it contains the reasons for my attachment to the gloomy Oaklanders, words they themselves spoke: the failures of the first albums (Pain of Mind above all... the producer ran off with the sales profits...), the serious themes and visceral destructive live shows, the strongly experimental approach more interested in the band's overall sound rather than specific riffs, their tendency to break free from norms at all costs (a primordial urge...). Even Steve von Till, in the aforesaid article, made a point of specifying how hardcore is a good school of life, and how he considered grunge, especially from bands like Nirvana, Helmet, and Soundgarden, a genre too overrated... who knows how many turned up their noses at such statements, I would've done so back then. Had I listened to Souls at Zero at that time, I would surely have fled like a frightened child before the boogeyman... I rolled down the window to smoke another cigarette... meanwhile, the notes of "The Web" made the car vibrate, in the cold of this winter night. I recalled how much anger, how much frustration led me, years and years ago, to fully mirror myself in the suffering and catharsis of Neurosis... I remember the ridicule I faced when, in bursts of inner turmoil, I unhesitatingly compared them to the more laid-back, yet no less skilled, Tool, with a single condition: Neurosis are more REAL. But nothing, only despair and misunderstanding. When I first got my hands on Souls At Zero, I was very skeptical... it will never, I told myself, surpass that other masterpiece of negative ecstasy that is Through Silver in Blood... but as time passed, the evidence grew in me, like a parasitic fungus, like a rejected revelation that exacts revenge by confirming itself as certainty, day after day... I was a mailman in the countryside, and I remember how I set off every morning from the post office, loaded with mail, walkman in ears, cassette with Souls At Zero, for an entire summer. Every day, or almost. People sometimes looked at me curiously as I walked around their mailboxes singing in a soft and tormented voice the splendid songs that had by then deeply lodged themselves in my ever-restless soul, making those working hours pleasant yet at the same time poignant and melancholic... unforgettable... "Excuse me miss, what are you doing??", a woman once said to me... "I have long hair, but I'm a man, ma'am!" I replied, "sorry, I was rewinding the side...". "Please move, I need to pass with my car, you're blocking my way...".  This cigarette is finished too. I'm poisoning myself, tobacco tastes awful... I think about that cruel girl, her lack of prominent humanity, leaving me stranded waiting for her in vain for an hour... meanwhile, "A chronology for survival" heightens, a good title, fitting for this moment where the thought of suicide presents itself as an enigmatic temptation. "Rise, Run, Feed, Ripen, Wound, Wither, Fall, Rise again" says the chorus. It's easier to let oneself be buried by dust than to fight with all one's might to resurface and breathe deeply again. I started the car and drove towards the venue... next to it there's a late-night piadina stand, what we call a zozzone, and what I need is a zozzeria with sausage and onion. As I wait, I see her. there she is, SHE'S there, coming out with her friends... and a guy who at one point surrounds her with his arms, and kisses her... the zozzone hands me my junk food and I pay a hefty 4 Euros. I stay there, watching them smile, devouring that turpentine and garlic concoction, and when they pass by, she looks up and, a bit upset, stops, defensively, and says: "I'm sorry... you're too old for me...". "Thanks, I hadn't realized!!" I replied with the world's foulest breath... the guy, with gelled hair and a punchable face, didn't flinch. She didn't say another word, nor did I. I got back in the car, and turned on the stereo again: "Takeahnase" was the liberating scream I so needed. But then, the last track, "Empty", sweet, graceful in its final arpeggio, restored my peace and that sense of hope, which, inexplicably, always and only arises when our howls and tears for a world and existence adrift seem never-ending. Merry Christmas... oh, don't bother me with stories like: "You should have talked more about the album...": the album in question is PAIN.