Noyz Narcos
Verano Zombie

"I don't have a woman because I have / the obsessions from Salò, / a death hip-hop group and I do karashò."

The excessive elegance and timeless beauty of this line - taken from the track that gives the album its name - serve as a perfect profile for Noyz Narcos, a technically capable rapper, somewhat cultured, disturbed, and a bearer of a very specific imagery. You know where Noyz is heading, he makes it clear: he exaggerates, paints himself and his crew - the Truceboys, themselves part of the Truceklan - as the worst beasts of Satan, plagued by a thousand (self-)destructive vices. Noyz pisses a little further and longer, hoping the nauseating stench is felt a few meters ahead. The mask he wears is that of a wandering zombie in that kingdom of degradation that is the negative side of Rome: in the shadow of the Colosseum, the monuments, Cinecittà, der Pupone, the exotic neighborhood charm, there's the real filth, the coke, and the "sturdy nostrils," there's the alienation of outcasts denied any possibility of redemption.

"I never go to bed before 4 / fucking alone in the company of drugs and alcohol / Fuck your judgment, fuck if you don't care / Fuck every one of my vices and fuck the guilt"

Verano Zombie is a part of the real modern Italian music history, the one hidden from mainstream channels but raised by the Internet and ingested in the belly of those hungry for raw reality who seek it out. Noyz doesn't do it all alone, and his guests dominate as much as he does. In the title-track (certainly the centerpiece track of the album), Metal Carter proves to be a total psychopath ("I enter the disco with a machine gun and kill everyone"), but his message gets across, and his verse, eleven years later, is a cult: it is the exasperation and the ignition of despair, with everything that follows, for himself ("taking shit every day is the issue / it's just that without it I can't manage"), for others ("my buddies guide you to Hell / I have a stash of pills for the winter") and for his loved ones ("a corpse to carry in the trunk / for every mistake I make she has a cut"). Guè Pequeno, of course, when he nails the verse, seems always a cut above the others ("my guys inhale the Sahara / drink bitter gasoline, then piss the Niagara"), Marracash confirms himself as the rising star of the time (his the memorable chorus of "Mentalità da Clan"), and Chicoria is as usual narrative, prosaic, didactic, the corrupt teacher who rounds up his salary by dealing and helps students get it (he appears in "Infame"). And then there's Danno, straight from Colle Der Fomento, to craft that legendary track that is "Karashò," which could also serve as the manifesto of the album. "It's Karashò for the audience / Rubik's cube rap trapped in a Kubrick-style massacre": Verano Zombie must be deciphered for what it really is - the manifesto of an existential and unremovable discomfort - but meanwhile, it knows how to entertain, incite the listener with incendiary horror rap. The instrumentals, in this regard, energetic and corrosive in nature, are exploited to the fullest by all the rappers involved.

"Sometimes I hate myself / and that big dickhead of a boy reflected in the bathroom mirror"

And then, of course, there's Noyz, the leader of the Klan, the coachman towards the distorted and macabre underground Rome. Reluctant spokesperson of "all the living dead, the kilo dealers," Noyz takes shape in the many forms of his city, as he says in "Karashò." He doesn't hold back, and above all, he doesn't alienate: Noyz, in the words of the alienated and unhinged character he wears in the album, douses the brain and limbs in the worst sewage water, stains the conscience with a self-harm without end: "I drip blood like quarters of beef on hooks," while "tucked away in dark apartments not sleeping," "I spill blood when I piss" and "exchange Satan for Christ." Crushed to the ground by an oppressive society, Noyz Narcos doesn't get back up, but he digs his own grave: he keeps going down, down to the underworld, where his guttural voice will rise again, avenging his crew, always proudly on the side of those who refused to align. That of Verano Zombie is not trivial protest music, just as its language is not forcibly provocative. Verano Zombie is the projection in music and rhyme of a concrete, ancestral and indefinable malaise, painful and difficult to focus on; it is not fiction, but the extreme amplification of a core of terribly real anguish, and if expressed in a sugarcoated or worse cryptic form, it would end up being ignored. Instead, with the words of Noyz and Truceklan, it all comes through, vivid and uncomfortably. An ulcerated and bleeding viscera.

"Truceboys, it's this shitty air you breathe / this city is as bastard as half of its kids"