Verdena
Requiem

I'm running out of cigarettes. It's a problem, especially since it's cold outside and I don't feel like going out.

Requiem for me then, who evidently deserves a terrible end. Lend an ear, the joyful song of death approaches, bringing new life to the earth. The black lady, as we know, doesn't mince her words.

I'm going to smoke the penultimate one. The world is a tourist attraction, therefore I could compensate for the lack of nicotine with pornography. Or maybe with music.

I'm certain death smokes; after all, it's the shittiest job in the universe, you're never still, at least a cigarette every now and then.

I believe I'm part of a nightmare, here Verdena's wall reaches an unheard degree of perversion. This is their stylistic hallmark, changing with each album they release. And they know they're firing their last bullets of visceral violence because after this comes WOW, fear and loathing.

The beginning relies on a triptych that already claims many victims, Don Calisto who teasingly deludes us about the passing of time: “it's like a river, can't you see?”; Eugenio for brevity is the nightmare of all dermatologists assailed by stagnant foul pus; then comes Angie, gentlemen, not even the decency to hide the title: “Monday is the witches' day,” the obsession with recurrent themes of Alberto and company, the first real hit that introduces psychedelia into the album.

Desperate joy, lucid madness, in Muori Delay they sound like the Strokes on methamphetamines. It all ends with Alberto starting: “I believe I'm part of a nightmare.” I don't know, but this doesn't seem like an inner reflection to me, rather an outburst towards the cosmic nothingness that surrounds us. How can such a poignant verse degrade into so much violence? It almost seems like a parallel with death, at your funeral there won't be anyone to tell you how it went, if you managed to pick a flower in your life, if you have fixed its perfect geometry and smelled the pollen.

“Forever in trouble, bruised, it will never change.” Verdena always change, however, and I'm sorry I didn't see them on the Requiem tour. The album ends with an anthem to self-destruction, to flogging. You don't dance. You stare into the void. I'm running out of cigarettes again.