the turin horse
Unsavory Impurities

Long-time members of the Italian music underground come together to create a new project.

“Unsavory Impurities” (2023) by The Turin Horse is not an easy album to understand and listen to, just as the bands from which the musicians originate were not easy: Dead Elephant (Enrico Tauraso, vocals and guitar) and Morkobot (Alain Lapaglia, drums) supported by the baritone sax of Alessandro Cartolari.

An album not easy to listen to because there's a lot going on in these 37 minutes and at first, the pace is that of a panzer with noise rock tinged with sludge and mathcore, with Tauraso's suffering screams on vocals (“Sixty Millions Blues”, “The Regret Song”) and an intro of noise inspiration like “The Maximum Effort for The Maximum Result”.

The Turin Horse then presents us with a sound fresco made of violent guitar riffs, pounding drums, and unhealthy and distressing vocals perfectly audible in tracks like “Blissed Out” and the corrosive “Necessary Pain”. In “Birds Sings a Death Song”, they return to creating cacophonous noise with the help of samples, while in “The Light That Failed”, they resume grinding out dizzying noise rock that in the end multiplies the decibels of the din. The music by The Turin Horse is made of dissonances and a continuous alternation of blind fury and chewing fragments of metallic clangs of pure blood mixed with sweat.

And now we come to the most experimental part of the album: “Where The Seed Can’t Take Root” is a track with ambient connotations where the singing is first subdued and then gradually the noise samples advance; Tauraso's screams give us no respite with those metallic clangs that, far from abandoning us, become more and more present.

In the last two tracks, we have—as mentioned earlier—the presence of Alessandro Cartolari's baritone sax, and the lengthy (eight minutes and forty-eight seconds) “Hybris” is a soundtrack halfway between ambient music and free-jazz, with traits painted delicately and almost dimmed compared to the hellish sarabande we've heard in previous pieces. It closes with a cathartic piece like “Tear Off The Stitches” where the baritone sax gains strength and makes its own the more luciferine free-jazz raids, while Alain Lapaglia's drums and Enrico Tauraso's voice and guitar start pounding with extreme noise hardcore again, with the help of synths and samples, ending in a whispered and slowed manner. Thus concludes the album, and personally, I find myself electrified by such a result. For those who loved Dead Elephant and Morkobot, but also experimental Italian bands like Zu and Mombu, this is a sure bet, and I can only say “you must” listen (as if it were an imposition) to this explosive debut by The Turin Horse, who have really hit the mark with “Unsavory Impurities”.