OVO
Abisso

Damn Italian alternatives. And there I was, watching the video of “Tokoloshi”: great groove, great drums, great animalistic voice, noise yes, but not too much. Who would have thought it was the only catchy track.

Enticing mix of genres, acclaimed criticism, intriguingly naive and unsettling cover art, in short: everything made me think/foresee/hope that it was the differently likable album of the tricolor alternative scene, cool, hyped, well-produced, a jewel that could perfectly fit into my musical path toward a lively old age, not just made of extremisms and a desire for Death. Who would have thought that “Abisso” was yet another disturbing and annoyingly sounding album that I would have to listen to. (As the National would say: “Trouble Will Find Me”!) Imagine this: created by the drummer of Bachi da Pietra and the all-round rastafarian guitarist Stefania Pedretti, someone who knows well how to disguise her belonging to the fair sex behind the microphone.

Yes: I expected warbling and at worst unbelievable declamations in Diamanda Galàs style, and instead beastly growls, throat-tearing screams, slurred guitars like bucketfuls of corrosive acid on the ears. OvO are not the winking indie-ritual-experimental-dark-avant-noise-rocker I was expecting. O shopkeepers, you shouldn't have displayed “Abisso” next to Massimo Volume and Santo Niente CDs (and not even among Zu and Ufomammut, we might add), you are deceiving buyers! Rather throw them into the box near the door of the restroom along with old albums from Khanate or Today Is The Day(I regret to say, but the first comparison that comes to mind is that “Sadness Will Prevail” from the Nashville formation).

So let's start over: OvO, after more than a decade of experience, now coming to yet another album, and having already landed with the previous “Cor Cordium” to Supernatural Cat (a label that has undoubtedly given them greater visibility), arrive with “Abisso” (2013) at the fateful and well-deserved moment of consecration. Everything in “Abisso” reeks of consecration, starting from the choice of relying, in production, on a renowned figure like Favero (Teatro degli Orrori), to the deployment of guest stars recruited for the occasion, none other than Alan Dubin, directly from the disbanded Khanate, and miss Carla Bozulich-Evangelista, whose plaintive voice pairs beautifully with Pedretti's vitriolic one in “Fly Little Demon”. It’s thus consecration, though this in itself means nothing, as it's known that consecration often arrives late and not necessarily coincides with an artist's creative peak.

If “Abisso” is truly the duo’s best work, or simply an (unwise) overambitious step, the fans who have thoroughly listened to OvO’s extensive discography will tell us. What I can say is that “Abisso” in its fifty-one minutes delivers a mature band aware of its means, and gives us more than one winning blow to raise an already more than good assessment. Someone might also say that the sound has partially normalized, that the modus operandi of “sound everywhere, without compromises, and with whatever I find on hand” that animated the group at its origins has been lost along the way, along with the genuineness and recrudescence of the old Ovo, and undoubtedly the increase in means available, a better cut and ironed look (evidently intended for a wider audience) and the positioning behind the mixer of that sly fox Favero (who had already collaborated with Dorella in “Quintale”, contributing to the heavy/stoner shift the Bachi embarked on with their acclaimed latest work) have played a part in this.

But as in any transition or maturation phase (and it’s undeniable that OvO have grown somehow) if something is lost, something else is surely gained. And in “Abisso” the circle is squared, the achievement of a difficult point of balance in which the two musicians manage to confer “harmony” to a set of distant elements, which in their succession appear well blended and arranged in the correct sequence (although the initial impression is that of anarchy of sounds and instruments mistreated, with some banality scattered here and there). It benefits the listening: “Abisso” doesn’t shine for the single episode, but for the overall sensation it emanates as a whole, for the way in which the settings, voids, and fulls merge into one another. Thus, it’s a triumph of schizoid micro-shards (“I Cannibali”, “Pandemonio”) exploding and punctuating exhausting absences made of creaks (“A Dream Within a Dream”), more thought-out excursions with hypnotic progressions (“Ab Uno”) and authentic esoteric nightmares (the aforementioned “Fly Little Demon” with Evangelista), in a collapse of sounds that continually evoke images, sensations, and concepts such as abyss-destabilization-apocalypse-chaos-discomfort-improvisation-deformity-tearing.

“Abisso” is thus, as the title suggests, the musicalization of an authentic descent into the Inferno, the spinal cord leading from the calm of the surface to the turbulent celebration of an underground mass of distorted and disjointed sounds, sometimes liquid, elsewhere dry to dust. The overwhelming tribal verve of the granite and versatile Dorella (who here more than elsewhere I have found part of the role) and the pan-naturalistic field-recording of Pedretti, helped for the occasion by Rico Gamondi (Uochi Toki), even before the fleeting and much-trumpeted ethnic music inserts borrowed directly from the African continent (not much if one considers the economy of it all), imprint a rush toward that primitive, archaic, ancestral core, where primordial and primordial energies collide with great noise: metaphysical and universal places that have always constituted the ultimate destination of the project, with a final result that makes OvO’s music (by chance) a metaphorical expression, mirror and at the same time deformation of a symposium of irreparable fractures and tears (of the self?) typical of our terrible times.

And we could continue talking nonsense indefinitely: the review of a work like “Abisso” lends itself to taking the form of a whimsical list of adjectives or superlative expressions, or the most disparate musical genres; and is the typical review that opens or concludes with the highest rating or with a more reassuring SV. And in the end, nothing is ever understood. In line with my 2014 intention to be as concise as possible, I’ll stop here and tell you: it’s worth it, if only for that heart-leaping moment provided by hearing Dubin’s voice again in “A Dream Within a Dream”, which brings a bit of Khanate air back to our rooms. And in all honesty, we missed this air.