Zu
Bromio

Italians do it better: part 3

Before deciding that Tom Araya was their Elvis, Mike Patton the big boss with ready funding and easy collaboration, and John Zorn the enthusiastic fan late to the party, the Zu were just three young kids. It seems like talking about the Pleistocene, doesn't it? 1998, Rome. Very little resemblance to the band that now, on their MySpace page, shows off a concert list as long as a Christmas lunch. MySpace didn't even exist twelve years ago. Yet, they were always themselves. Almost. Luca Mai on baritone sax, Massimo Pupillo on bass, Jacopo Battaglia on drums. It almost brings a smile to say it now, with a "Carboniferous" behind them and an already extensive discography, but to decontextualize means just losing the thread: at the time, their only income came from composing music for theater. Stage nervousness, curtain-call puns. What better occasion to flex the muscles of their embryonic jazzcore, so different from the American school yet so vital? The grin at the bottom belongs to Rosario, a Sicilian trumpeter who would become really famous years later. Creating other kinds of scenes, like the pathetic and stale one of the globalization sound, or the town band to be sent on television, the siempre contra counterpart of missino Morselli. But he allowed himself to reveal his great talent, with the chime of secure coins in his pocket, in more uncertain and financially unstable projects. Just like this one, after all. You all know him, he goes by Roy. Paci.

To spit fire on stage, you need wine in your veins. "Bromio" is born here: a Euripidean pseudonym aimed at Dionysus becomes the dictate of a remarkable debut, of someone who takes on full responsibility, despite their immaturity, for unrestrained pioneering. The four, instruments in hand, create nothing. Nothing, at least, that hadn't already been tested overseas. There is not just one kind of reference cited in length in every review, but also a free and unstructured form in the use of winds that reaches back in time. In Italy, however, it's a bolt out of the blue. Justifiably so, considering the precision and compactness of an album compressed into short-duration structures, within which Mai, Pupillo, Battaglia, and Paci rampage, painting with an imaginative hand a fresco where hell is the perfect backdrop for solid blends fluctuating between free jazz, hardcore comebacks, and a pompous taste for melody, tousled by sharp trumpet phrases.

Forget any metallic aspirations, especially in light of a "Carboniferous" that, with a brutal and unexpected turn, has violently shaken the overall image of the old Zu. "Bromio" is not a ferocious work, or rather, it lacks the overwhelming impact of the latest masterpiece from Ipecac. It also lacks for long stretches the devilish awareness of "Igneo," the versatility of handling sounds and physically experienced doses long juggled in the various splits. Where recent evolutions project the Roman trio's composition on the axis of Battaglia's adventurous drum kit, here there is trench warfare around bass lines, very deep grooves that refract on the snare and are chipped, with conquest aspirations, by the ensemble of sax and trumpet, in a continuous and disordered assault towards nothingness. "Detonatore" is a sulfurous whiff that starts and stops, starts and stops, and only then begins to sink into a circus whirlpool where the clowns wear masks of John Gacy jr. "Xenitis" is the perfect track, a playful Spanish vibe that is pierced by a miraculous Pupillo. "Asmodeo" attacks with the tragic languor of a Medea in which, however, explode disheveled hearths very close to what will be the most visceral and heartfelt breaths of noise clangs of Moonchild, the (for now) quadrilogy of monsieur Patton and mastro Zorn. 

The theatrical feeling, the taste for breaks, the loading of exaggerated, grotesque, grand-guignolesque, and sometimes lavish accents ("Testa Di Cane") into their songs can be heard here, and nowhere else. Zu terribly serious, yet simultaneously amused and to a good extent complacent, exploding in the staggering advance of "Zu Circus" - the scream before the skirmish, the warning that anticipates the transformation: then the curtain, the applause -, in the collision of "Villa Belmonte" or in the incomparable wall of sound permeating "Erotomane", subsequently dividing into burnt bebop curls in perpetual decay. It is, in many ways, the imperious nod of the phoenix that dies, putting on a show and rising with new colors from its ashes.

Everything foundational, in the years to come, starts from here. Indispensable.