Zeus!
Zeus!

Italians do it better: part 5

Recommending an album starting from the live performance. If these tracks had made an excellent impression on me on a fixed medium, hearing them again the other night in Padua, about a meter and a half away from Luca Cavina's thunderous bass (already here, forgive the old typo) and Paolo Morgagna's frugal drum kit (kindly joining in the tour of this album and now permanently with a completely different duo) absolutely annihilated me. A devastating mess, without any middle ground. Just the right and substantial ideas. A shock wave of uncontrollable, overflowing, intelligent rage. Even a bit cerebral, if you will. But anything but trivial or pretentious. And here the "usual" Italian decade of delay on foreign proposals is metabolized and expelled in a dynamism that clears away stereotypes and clichés, finally giving us a product that doesn't need announcements across town to stand on its own.

If they had called themselves Zeus, it would have been the umpteenth megalomania of a couple of jerks. Instead, they opted for Zeus!. Which is not an affirmation: it's an imposition. Their debut is also titled "Zeus!", released in co-production for a handful of labels each better than the last. You have the masochistic pleasure of hunting them down, one by one. Pieces of Italy that suffers, works, beats, moves (far from FUS). Fellow travelers found on our path hundreds of times, some more than capable of managing their essence completely independently. Like these nine songs(?), shards of terror dumped onto the listener - what flow - amid distortions, filters, effects, gigantic riffs, guest appearances, rhythmic madness. A Dadaistic hell with the essence of Fantômas, the pace of math-core, and a proudly tricolored taste for the absurd. It's not the usual famolo strano, but a project of reasoned schizophrenia, of provocative sincerity.

Bass and drums: one could say a guitar would fit perfectly as well. Nothing could be further from reality. The only episode where a six-string is heard is, not by chance, in "Golden Metal Shower", the concluding track, where the ubiquitous Giulio Ragno Favero unfurls meters and meters of old-style metal wire (bordering on thrash) for something very much like a stealthy cinematic chase. The excellence is elsewhere: in the folds of "Giacomo Leopardi", for example, a relentless series of virulent clockwork interlocks with an unbeatable instrumental section, in the tanz debil of "Turbo Pascal" with its languid psychedelic slowdowns, in the acid grind of "Suckertorte" or in "Koprofiev", built on perpetual stop-and-go glances at sludge before restarting with impressive kinetic hardcore energy. They don’t waste time talking ("Steve Sylvester Saves"): why should you?

May Zeus be with you.