Savatage
Handful of Rain

THE REVIEW

Dylan Dog n. 66 "Game with Death". A citation of citations, cultured like a banana with a sticker. But I care little. I remember when I was in full adolescence, I read Dylan Dog to soften the various Poe and Dosto' and listened to Savatage to prematurely transition from puberty to a more mature age. Ridiculous! I had noticed that girls grew up faster. I wanted to grow up too, not knowing that I would regret it. Because now that I am at a (somewhat more) mature age and I listen to the Savatage again, with a life behind me not yet so long but loaded with golden axes and clubs, I have understood many things (ridiculous(!), I say this to myself here too). At the time of Handful Of Rain, they had already played the game with death. And they were entirely subjugated by it. Believing they won it, they explored with the heart of the metal/rocker that feeling of alienation and paranoia that one has in the dwelling built by oneself: a castle of damn questions to which only damn answers are found. But it is the way you ask the questions that becomes so imaginative, elusive, hypochondriac, in need of caresses, brilliant, progressive (in the sense of that inner crescendo felt in the illusory conviction of being close to the truth) that frescoes the castle in such a way that not even the Brothers Grimm could have devised. Towers with ninety-degree corners, lace from different eras, columns that span from Greek styles to Rococo. And a raft platform from Charon to lay the "monster", making them feel like seasoned explorers of the boundary between life and death.

This was the Savatage in 1994. The album in question is pathetic. But it is a patheticism that moves. Perhaps the English adjective moving better conveys the idea. Tracks that throb in the grip of schizophrenic raptures like Taunting Cobras and Nothing's Going On reveal wounded men who would like to be beasts but are simple naked creatures struggling against the constant movement of the windmills' balls, in an improbable comeback against the immobile solidity of events. Just like Don Quixote, they first make you feel a sense of derision, then pity. Moreover, it must be said that violence sharpens pain and salts the wounds. Even the explosion of strength and impact resistance worthy of a bullet-riddled Tony Montana is followed by a long moment of physical and moral pain, then the stasis. There arises dignity, leading to reason and clarity for the mere five minutes of the title track, which is a rough and stable awareness like an Audi with tinted windows, where you can travel and think while in the passing lane, and others, seeing your image in the rearview mirror, move aside, leaving the road as open as possible.

Even Savatage, as ordinary men and musicians, lived on a flat path of consciousness bordering a steep rock slope on one side and a fast and foggy downhill slope on the other. Slopes that measured the desire for challenge in life on one side, and the fear of cerebral obfuscation on the other. In the end, with a simple misstep, the neuronal connections can snap and one goes mad. While with many hard steps, one could climb back up. Oliva and company, shocked and stunned, are a muscular zombie wandering freely between the depths of humidity and the crevices of the highest rocks, discovering what can be felt in an epic life complete with emotions and discoveries, certainties and fatality, moments of recovery and irreparable slips. For this reason, tracks like Watching You Fall, Alone You Breathe, Stare Into The Sun, and all the others (how not to mention Castles Burning) redeem sonically, the notes of a journey we could not see, but which sounds like a complete and accomplished theatrical work, assigning the various moments of pathos on the crest of the silence of the listeners, to different musical genres. The crudest heavy metal leaves the stage to hard rock, epic metal, reflections of country, and progressive. Reflections of death punctuated by lyrics that provide vivid but, as I said before, equally pathetic and moving visions. Going by abstractions, listening today to Handful Of Rain, I seem to have these poor souls under my eyes, enclosed in a transparent plexiglass cube, moving like desperate adventurers detached from any real context. At first glance, they seem ridiculous, but if you observe them one by one, they have the movements of disoriented mythological heroes of our time. An album that makes its strength in its mixture and structure and, why not, its pursuit. An album that shows how Criss Oliva's death left the worst of living to the others of the band. The worst of living to the others of the band. And sorry for the repetition. The review. Not the concept. That is important.