Verdena
Elefante EP

I first listened to "Corteccia (nell'up-nea)" at one of their concerts and fell in love with it immediately. They opened the live show with that song; "Il Suicidio dei Samurai" had been released, and I was completely captivated by their melancholic, psychedelic, angry, experimental, "massive" music: I always said that if I had a band, I would play like them. Indeed, tracks like "Balanite", "Luna", "Mina", "Glamodrama", "Onan", "Nova", "Centrifuga" had literally enchanted me.

When they launched into that track, something strange happened: we were all still, silent, as if hypnotized by that sad, lysergic, paranoid arpeggio and by those bursts of noise that suddenly tore through, like lightning, the horizon. Perhaps we were all exclusively focused on listening to that splendid piece never heard before, which remarkably expressed what the Verdena musically were (and would) become after an evident evolution that had led them from being raw youngsters with a passion for Grunge, to creators of their own mature and recognizable sound and style, first with the splendid psychedelic turn of "Solo Un Grande Sasso" and then with the more defined "song-form" of "Il Suicidio Dei Samurai". Opening the concert with "Corteccia (nell'up-nea)" was a memorable, disorienting moment; the best of the entire performance.

When the EP was released shortly thereafter, I was sure to find that track that had struck me so much, along with much more: there is indeed the magic of a rustic ballad like "Perfect Day", there is "Mu" a piece suspended between distorted riffs and paranoia, and there is the experimentation of "Passi Da Gigante", with its obsessive and hypnotic tribal rhythm. 

There are the various souls of Verdena, well represented in what is perhaps their best EP.