Saint Vitus
Saint Vitus

It is the slow and progressive agony of a metronome that starts boldly at 150-160 bpm (the primordial tarantula-martyrizing metal of the opener "Saint Vitus"), only to end up smoked by tetrahydrocannabinol, coated in lysergic acid, reduced to swaying worse than a drunk with pants down to those hypnotic 30-50 bpm of the three concluding masterpieces (the old school dope-diarrhea-doom of "Zombie Hunger", "The Psicopath", "Burial At Sea").

It is Dave Chandler's guitar, an aspiring proto-metaller with the face of a Hispanic delinquent, a flea-ridden mop and a brain bartered with some honest merchant in Parco Sempione. When He plays the guitar, it always seems like Iommi is having fun with one of those amps with a boiled cone that the Blue Cheer allegedly used once to kill a hapless dog. The effect is more or less like a bumblebee trapped in a cardboard box, but if you tune everything a couple of dozen octaves lower than usual, something good comes out. Fuzzy, for sure. But good.

It is the face of a bad Doraemon, with the mustache and a slightly camp voice of Scott Reagers (martyr, sorcerer, undead, psychopath and buried alive, depending on the script requirements), someone who doesn't even try to imitate Ozzy, maybe because he understands it's better to have a decent singer, maybe not a genius, but endowed with a touch of personality and a couple of vaults of exaggerated theatricality, rather than a pathetic clone.

It is the bass of Mark Adams, it is the drums of Armando Acosta. It is a rhythmic section sometimes uncertain and limping, sometimes imprecise, but always obsessive, oppressive.

It is a strange stray breed of buzzing and dark metal, a black mixture of '80s heavy, seventies reminiscences, pachydermic liturgical-Sabbathian slow-downs and Hammer film-like lyrics. Five songs in thirty-five minutes. Raw, imperfect. Butterflies of a metal harder than iron. Slow motions of guitarism, slow and inexorable dripping of bass drum, snare drum and timpani, faltering wanderings of rhythms, hypnotizing blend of beat and off-beat, images of zombies, tombstones, and witches projected in slow motion to make them scarier. And solos played on glass scales that shatter in the brain into sharp shards with acidic wah-wah and sepulchral distortions.

It is the old school of Doom that, in 1984, opens its enrollments.

It is the debut of Saint Vitus.. let the dance begin..