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Anatomia - Ossuary gig in Bologna, October 2024 @ Freakout Club

Anatomia / Ossuary concert in Bologna

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To seldomly leave the comfortable four walls in order to attend a gig is still something I am extremely reticent to do, albeit there are indeed perfect storms that unerringly manage to lift my heavy ass from the couch. And to have Anatomia, which is my favorite current Death Metal band playing half an hour from home, with free ticket and trip, well, who am I to challenge the gods of Death?

Ossuary

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen Ossuary live before. I’ve definitely listened to a few tracks online, but as far as I can recall, it wasn’t an experience that left a lasting impression. When I entered the venue, the band had just started playing, and I grumbled a bit, overhearing some not-so-impressive screams over equally not-so-memorable music. However, once I settled in the back with a cold beer in hand, I have to admit, the overall experience wasn’t actually that bad.

Their intentions are honest and clear, and in line with their name: to recreate obsessive deathly chants, with an otherworldly, croaking voice drenched in reverb, layered over a cyclical and relentless backdrop typical of many Death/Doom approaches from recent years. On that level, the band works well, in my opinion. The vocalist truly seems possessed by some form of otherworldly force, and the thick layer of reverb they add to the dead’s agonized screams blends the sonic experience into an interesting package that, while not stylistically, reminds me of something like Tryptikon trapped in a never-ending maze of mirrors.

As a near-death experience, these Ossuary aren’t bad at all. Their only real problem is that there’s nothing riff-wise that sticks in your head, not a single moment when you could touch the beyond. This is only made worse by the fact that they’re touring with perhaps one of the very few bands that never miss a single great riff. While Ossuary doesn’t have it, the band coming up next certainly does. And boy, do they have it…

Anatomia

I might be biased when talking about this band because I have been respectfully obsessive about their works. A few might remember that they formed in a time when we did not have Autopsy and nobody really stood, apart from a couple of attempts on Razorback, to take the crown of the dead from the podium of the best Death Metal band around. Death Metal as in “ultimate form of extreme horror music”, I mean. The Death Metal that grabs you by the throat and licks your face with a rotting tongue.

Honestly, my grasp of the language is not solid enough to describe how Anatomia represents in my opinion the perfect embodyment of this genre, at the moment. Even thinking of an Autopsy-minus-Abscess formula doesn’t do complete justice because they have trascended that some time ago alrady. They just sit and drag you in a red and black japanese hell of grotesque deamons with bulging eyes, tearing flesh in endless SLOW agony. You don’t hear a band when you see them live, you experience a slow drag into a netherworld of pain. I don’t need words here, just listen to any tracks by this band, like this one that was on the split 7″ i released on my label in 2017, and hear how it is to have it, what you can do when you find the perfect formula.

I’m not sure if the choice of bands was intentional, but thinking about it on the way back, for once, I could see some sort of design of things. If the first band was the revelation of otherworldly horror, with Anatomia we reached the second act, where you’re taken straight into the depths of hell.

Felsina Deathfeast, May 2022

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An occasion like any other, after all, to get off my ass and get out of these four walls, even if lately even what once seemed like a regular weekend gives me the impression of being wrapped in a strange state of unreality.

About half an hour’s drive from the sewer where I live, this little concert was held with seven (in the end, due to bureaucratic problems, they ought to be six) bands, four of which would have been English-speaking (USA, UK, Australia, I already have a headache just thinking about the salad of accents).

As it happens, it was also an opportunity to take the cathartic satisfaction of seeing that the other old farts I’ve been sharing drinks with for thirty-plus years at concerts have aged as much as I have. The shows at the Freakout club generally share an incredibly urban imprint, at the same time homely and vaguely decadent, which I really like. The punk cesspool that opened nearby might not have been a blessing for the ease of parking, but more people mean more opportunities so maybe it was not for the worse.

Skulld

This is a band that puts me in a weird condition of indefiniteness. I never actually heard of them before so I was completely tabula rasa and without particular expectations, I was however hooked a minute into the first song by among the most interesting brutal Swedish Death songwriting I have heard on Italian ground, really the band set could have been impressive if it wasn’t butchered by an awfully terrible vocalist. I tried to selectively filter out the vocals in my mind and focused on the instruments and well, top-notch stuff in there. But those annoying wailings are there, nonetheless.

Honestly, it has nothing to do with stage presence. Profanal to name the first relatable band that comes to mind, did a fantastic job on the same ground. It is just a matter of lacking punch and anger – unforgivable in extreme metal – misplaced vocal lines – again, not in the early Kataklysm kind of craziness – and a general sense that the whole vocal track was taken out from another record. Someone might know that my musical background is way more rooted in punk and USHC than classic metal so no, I can’t tell it’s a matter of personal preference either. Replace the singer with somebody that can ROAR and we’d have a top-tier band that could easily be placed in a Stockholm 1991 playlist.

Hateful

Watching Hateful last week made me seriously consider the essence of time. Hand they come out in 1992 this is a band that today would be signed to Road-fucking-runner touring the world with some other 50-something musicians that ran out of ideas 25 years ago (or instead of them). But here they are keeping the true spirit of doing things PROPERLY, focusing in detail on lyrics, artwork, musicianship and everything else a professional band cares for. Despite a small stage accident and indecent sound, they managed to play flawlessly as usual, their own brand of traditional US-influenced early ’90’s Death Metal.

Thinking about it in hindsight, we are still talking about a genre that for a number of bands tending to zero is a source of something more than a weekend hobby, playing with heart despite it being just a huge (expensive) hobby is accepting the dimension of our era. Hateful is the band we still don’t deserve.

Cryptic Shift

Cryptic Shift has been a pleasant surprise, one of the few bands I have seen lately that manages to pull out something different from the usual Incantation clone with dripping logos drawn by Indonesian artists for a couple of rice bowls.

They might have been lucky in that their writing is quite clean but of all the bands that played that day they have been in my opinion the only ones for which I could actually discern what was going on. They have this surprisingly interesting chemistry that creates a lurid mix of horror and Death Metal, malignant vocals sometimes reminding of early Disharmonic Orchestra, but with more emphasis on the horrific sonorities. Most of the best Death Metal actually was created by reimagining horror movie soundtracks with brutal distortions, so it’s not a surprise everything here works so well. They sometimes go over the top Gorguts dissonance but just when you are about to get annoyed they twist and get back on track. Interesting job, I won’t buy a record but it works.

Bedsore

I have talked about this band before and I stand my case. Despite an unexplainable decade of mediocrity during the ’90s Rome has been pushing forward extremely skilled musicians and awesomely competent bands for 20 years in a row now, including these Bedsore which fall into an uncomfortable spot of technical almost space-wave-metal. Let me be honest, I don’t like them and I didn’t like their show but you must be deaf if you don’t concede this band can write an album that is a long intricate voyage through violet cosmos. Part Death Metal part prog insanity a la Oxiplegatz, their show was a cosmic trip woven on strings of etherealness and raspy vocals. Not my cup of tea, and the sound was utter shit, but a good choice for people that like to get lost in twisting chords.

Haunter

Haunter

Could be three bands in a row with the same alternating “post” dissonance/arpeggio shifts are a bit too much for me, could be the place was so full I could not breathe, but I kinda skipped this set altogether. I am not the greatest freak for original ideas but I have heard half a gazillion songs in the last decade that combine the same elements over and over I feel nauseated as if I ate a bucket of white chocolate. Roar – solo – arpeggio – dissonant rewind – burst – dissonance, was fun for a while but I am full, thanks.

Suffering Hour

Suffering Hour

Profound Lore mates just like Haunter this band toys with the same ingredients but adds a pinch or two of out-of-place melancholic craziness typical of a certain breed of the late ’90s psych-core I did not entirely disdain back then. Still boring in a post-industrial way, I am beginning to understand that those who listen to this genre in recent years are looking for precisely this formula made of cold harmonies that can be traced back to an indefinite fusion of sounds associated with Black Metal and industrial. Once again we are out of my field, too much thought for my reptile brain.

Denouncement Pyre – Forever Burning out June ’22

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Maybe I’m not the biggest fan of this band, but the third and final album of the trilogy that came out on Hell’s Headbangers showed a version of Denouncement Pyre that was evolving from that mishmash of second rate Australian bands that sound a bit like the unfortunate cousins of their Swedish counterparts a la Nifelheim or the recent Ultra Silvam, and unfortunately, under a hat of bands of the caliber of Abominator, Bestial Warlust, Cemetery Urn or Eskhaton there are a lot of them that repeat the usual riffs in a D666 key with more or less protein.

With the third album “Black Sun Unbound”, however, we saw a version of Denouncement Pyre that came out of the trap of the first two, entering into fluider dynamics made of multilayered and well-balanced compositions. We shall see.

As anticipated, after three albums on Hell’s Headbangers they switched to Agonia, which may not be a guarantee of quality but has an established rapport with bands like these.

https://www.facebook.com/DENOUNCEMENTPYRE/

Italian report 2021 addendum

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TYRANNIZER ÖRDER

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I really forgot about these in the previous articles, but I have to make amends because Tyrannizer Order with the dieresis on the “o” in Motorhead style is actually one of the best early Marduk style Black Metal bands we have left, a band featuring Max from Natron, a band who I have to admit I started to lose interest in after the sophomore record. This band doesn’t rely on chilling atmospheres typical of the genre, but goes towards the spear-point massacre typical of bands like Black Witchery, even if without that depth of field. More than good in my book.

Lebbra

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Known absolutely by chance, these Lebbra from Salerno were a pleasant discovery, as they prove that not only Americans like Gruesome can make their own reference to early pre-masturbation Death, those Deaths that many of us old fuckers grew up with. Leprosy don’t play a plagiarism, opps I mean tribute, like the band above, but are more generically inspired by that early 90’s Death Metal that has its roots in bands with distinctive vocal tracks like Morgoth, Asphyx, Obituary. The songs are few but decently recorded, more than anything else I find it interesting that they sometimes indulge in such banal structures that in other formulas might be overly adolescent but that in the sphere, let’s call it OSDM, have their interest.

Pugnale

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Here, however, we are missing the point. These Pugnale, from Bergamo, show how you can do formally perfect homework at the art academy but fail to express anything interesting when you go to exhibit in a proper gallery. There’s nothing formally wrong here, if anything it’s a band perfectly capable of fusing crust, powerviolence, even certain black/death metal atmospheres into a single sound that however resolves, on the whole, to be a completely forgettable track after track, as often happens with bands from Eastern Europe or Germany. Add to that a singing as bland as boiled rice and no matter how hard I try I can’t find anything interesting. There’s a live show on YouTube, though, that shows they’re good on stage, so we’ll see how that develops.

Blood Artillery

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This wonderful little gem is intolerant’s Soul Devourer solo project and it’s objectively a small bijoux. Probably recorded in a Pakistani 7/11 store, with a martial minimalist layout seen a million times and a general blurring of sound like early Beherit, this is overall a work of heart and you can hear it, especially because you can hear actual songwriting going on within the chaos. By the way a full-length was released by local label Extreme Chaos this year, unfortunately only in digital format, but we hope to see at least a tape soon.

Derelict

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Here instead is a band that works great, in my opinion. Also from Rome and also on Extreme Chaos like the band before, but this time it’s the right combination of punk instinctiveness applied to a form of putrid Black Metal that would fit on a seven-inch with a photocopied cover of some shitty punkabbestia label at Leoncavallo, and boy, I would invest my euro I saved on warm beer cans for it, any day. Not as filthy necrotic as Gonkulator but some of those vibes are here. I really like it when these genres so distant and yet so close mix well.

Demonomania

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My rotten heart silently and manly approves when he hears this shitty attempt at playing Black Metal while high on acid. Everything falls apart and goes its own direction in these tracks recorded on lo-fi noise/grind label Olivia. This is a band that makes Derelict sound like Sabaton. Actually what I heard is probably just a late-night intoxicated jam session and I love it: think Goat Vulva after overeating spaghetti alla trabaccolara and cold wine + various psychotropic drugs.

Unexpected freedom

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Freedom in a glass

Paradoxical as it may seem, I had never seen the evolution, particularly the recent evolution, of the world of music publishing, of which this fanzine is a miserable part, from an external point of view.

Living it from the inside, I have always had an immobile and obtuse vision, willing to change only by virtue of personal choices and in relation to the evolution of technologies, but never from a social point of view. Of course, the first online articles date back to the end of the 90s and belong in a way to a pioneering era when even the big publications had practically not yet approached network technologies. That sea of shit of professional magazines was still clinging pitifully to paper, limiting itself to a paltry online presence as was usual in web 1.0, with the difference that no one, at least in Italy, and I mean this seriously, no one who wrote on any newsstand magazine, had even minimal competence in the world of underground extreme metal.

The first journalists capable of delving beyond the usual 3-4 major labels and doing a bit of research (we’re talking about a time when archives were the preserve of a few) appeared with the webzines of the early 00s. You only have to pick up any magazine from the 90s to see that the people writing about it didn’t understand shit. Yet there was something going on in the underground and there were some very nice and well written fanzines in Italy. There was a period at the turn of the 2000s when many American fanzines had become freebies, free copies given away with packages in collaboration with certain labels that could afford it.

It was at that time that this fanzine began an alternation of formats from print to online, an alternation that still persists today.

Although Nuclear Abominations has been online since about 1999, as I said before, I’ve always stubbornly limited myself to reviewing what labels and bands decided to send me, to avoid actively searching for new stuff, as I used to do in the 90s when I spent my evenings writing letters, duplicating tapes and flipping through mountains of flyers. It’s more comfortable to lazily wait for something new to come along to hear, after all. And my justification was that at least, I had to force myself to listen to genres and records that, by my own volition I would never have put on my turntable.

With little side effects, though.

One of them was listening to hours of crap records or completely useless stuff, just for the sake of ethics. The least I could do to repay the trust of a band or label that had spent money to send me something was to listen to the worst shit at least a couple of times, even if that also guaranteed that I could butcher a record as I did with some regularity. I’m sorry but the least you get if you send me a promo of crap music is an abrasive review. Secondly, there was also the problem that I’d end up wasting hours reviewing bands from the same big labels and missing out on the more interesting stuff that was circulating directly between bands without a contract. Add to that the shop break between 2002 and 2004 that took away all interest in the genre and all in all the last 20 years has been a disastrous series of false starts.

But then, in reality, I felt like writing from time to time and so every now and then I tried again, but I progressively saw the world changing at every false start, finally adapting to the new technologies, the physical promos gradually disappearing and a huge mass of interesting bands coming out every day. There was also the factor that, after 2005, certain sounds that today are called OSDM were rediscovered (that those who follow me since day one know well that I have always preferred here compared to all the rest), without counting the real Black Metal, the putrid and very violent one of Conqueror and Black Witchery, finally got an upper hand thanks to labels like Nuclear War Now.

In 20 years the world has changed radically.

Today there are no more promos, or rather there are thousands of electronic promos to browse, select, and first of all decide what to waste your time on, time which is increasingly limited. What seems to be a limitation, however, leads to a new vision of the profession of fanzinaro: even if now I have no guidelines to follow, I can only talk about the stuff I like because I no longer have moral duties towards anyone.

While it’s true that the music world is infested by woke, dry losers who are afraid of words, who are wary of reading a review of a record that might destabilize them, apart from the general weakness of these shits, the world is now proposing a very, very free perspective. Probably nobody follows blogs anymore, but it’s time to go back to the early days when you could select your own playlist. Incidentally, I have never earned a penny from this publication, but nowadays I am completely not willing to compromise. So I welcome the era of electronic promos, videos on social platforms. There might still be something to say, after all.

I should not still be here

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No really, I shouldn’t be here. And instead, I’ve been all evening sorting out and rereading drafts of old articles I wrote between 2011 and 2014, some absolute crap, most basically just quick messy notes, plus a couple of interesting ones that I plan to fix when I get an inspired night like this again.

Because even though I should be doing something else, and I really should, I always end up back here in the comfort zone talking about filth and rotten stuff. Nuclear Abominations stuff you know, disturbing horror ugliness in various forms.

To be completely honest, I barely buy new records nowadays. Most of my old, heavy collection is firmly closed into boxes on the upper floor of my house waiting for some construction works to finish one day. Like most people today, I too listen to a selected few records I have bought recently but most stuff I check online with headphones on. How relevant can be an opinion on this or that record anymore, considering everything is already at hand?

I have written posts on how completely different the job of a zine editor is today. Basically, I think I cannot even call myself one anymore since I hardly do what a zine editor is supposed to do. And I don’t have the patience or interest in carefully selecting words to safeguard some shitty album. I am not so sure what this last shot at the fanzine will lead to. Who knows.

This blog is destined to be just a reflection of how I feel about this and that record with no specific calendar, so check here every now and then. I might also be using this blog for updates on the label even if the proper blog for that is supposed to be the distribution one. But since the distribution is slowly folding, let’s keep everything here for the moment.

Veriluola “demo” e Nasty Savage “Wage of Mayhem”

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Tristemente, nonostante il nome, la Veriluola non è un pesce dell’acquitrino Ferrarese

Siccome non ho molta voglia di cercare in mezzo al casino degli ultimi acquisti (purtroppo comunque ormai datati) colgo l’occasione per recensire al volo le cagate che le etichette mi propongono via newsletter quando trovano il mio indirizzo nelle altre newsletter con i destinatari in chiaro. Per qualche motivo, sono finito in lista di questa Nameless Grave che ha un logo figo tutto bavoso e dice che questi Visciola, no spe VERILUOLA suonano Black/Death con influenze Archgoat. Io non so che si sono bevuti lassù, forse l’esbiotrina liquida per le zanzare ma questo è il miliardesimo gruppo con atmosfere distanti e sinfoniche di scuola olandese/slava come se ne sono sentiti per decenni. Che la capacità compositiva sia sensibilmente superiore a quella dei gruppi anni ’90 è ormai scontato visto che chi finisce su vinile ormai non ha più diciassette anni in media, ma tra saper comporre e far qualcosa di memorabile ne passa. Sta roba ormai mi sembra sempre più musica di sottofondo. E poi non il contorno nero sul titolo rosso, dio cane, che manco la No Colors.

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E vabbè lo devo ammettere ho un piccolo posticino nel mio cuore per i Nasty Savage perché quando ero piccolo Nasty Ronnie era un po’ un mio idolo a livello di outfit, borchiato come un guerriero postnucleare alla Mad Max ma senza l’effetto “punto SISAL” che avevano i Carnivore nei set fotografici. Nasty Ronnie era matto e in foto sudava testosterone sulle borchie e sulla pelle mentre le riviste metal erano piene di orrendi metrosex californiani coi capelli ossigenati e lunghissimi articoli nostalgici sui dinosauri dell’Hard Rock che gli editori ci infilavano sempre (erano un po’ i boomer dei boomer di oggi). Però si, quando il Metal era ancora un genere giovane e le incursioni nei generi erano dovuti più alle circostanze del brodo primordiale più che a qualche velleità artistica i Nasty Savage suonavano forse non la roba più aggressiva del mondo, ma suonavano con stile. Probabilmente i loro sono tra i pochi dischi che ho in casa che ho guardato più che ascoltato, visto che quella specie di proto-powermetal non è mai stato nelle mie corde.

Non è che adesso mi metto a recensire il demo che sta etichetta sta ristampando su CD con bonus track, che alla fine è una versione “beta” aperta e acerba di quel che è poi finito sui dischi. Buoni eh, però non è una cosa che mi metterei ad ascoltare oggigiorno, i dischi, figuriamoci il demotape.

Si ascolta per spirito di curiosità al limite.