Corey "Sacroniente" CD
[Dufresne]
33 tracks of quick, blasting grind/harcdore from Italy that uses a lot of great tempo changes to keep things interesting. Speed is frequent, but handled tastefully, and there are tons of excellent moderately paced or slow breaks, at times bringing in discordant melodies or layered guitar textures that I really like. The songwriting is really forceful, and I think that's their definite strength. Their multi-vocal attack tends to rely mainly on high/midrange screams with some low growls, but there's a ton of vocal layering that really makes things get pretty intense. The unusually brief 14 seconds of "Se Domani" even begins with an incredibly quick clean passage before exploding and ending before you realize what's going on. Similarly, but more developed and more effectively, "Without Answers" begins with incredibly beautiful clean guitars and uses spoken vocals for what is probably the most blatantly melodic song on the entire CD. Occasionally they'll break off a quick traditional hardcore rhythm, sludgy riff, or some more modern and generic metalcore riffs (leaning towards, but never hitting on, the whole crazy go nuts sort of thing), but for the most part this is rooted in a fairly diverse palette of grindcore in my opinion, and I definitely appreciate where they're going with this material. Amusingly enough the last two tracks, "6.66 Min to the Jesus' Death" and "Jesus is Dead", are more literal than expected, with "6.66 Min to the Jesus' Death" literally consisting of six minutes and 66 seconds of silence, and "Jesus is Dead" starting with nothing but screaming nonsense, several more minutes of silence, and then a nice little outro with acoustic guitars, percussion, and keyboards... It's a shame they wasted so much time there, I would've preferred to get the outro with no nonsense preceding it, but whatever. As far as the sound quality goes, the drums sound nice and natural, the guitars are heavy as fuck and have a ton of texture, and the vocals rest right alongside everything. The bass needs to be a little bit louder or rounded out because it's lightly distorted tone tends to blend in with the guitars, but for the most part the sound is very nice. The visual presentation is cool. The high contrast imagery of insects, spattered blood, and nails looks very cool and the minimal use of color works out nicely. What I don't like are the smaller fonts used in the layout, which are a bit out of place and can be very hard to read, and the band photos in the center spread are pixilated and look pretty crappy, which ruins the otherwise consistent appearance. The lyrics are in both Italian and English, with the majority probably in Italian, but not by much. The subject matter seems to be personal, but there's more of a message involved: "Yesterday I killed someone, I deprived him of my thought, I ignored his emotion, My indifference killed him, Maybe I killed myself, I killed at least one person yesterday." I do think this record is a little bit too long (not including the time subtracted because it's nothing but silence), but it is promising nonetheless. For a debut full-length this is a hell of a start. I'm pretty into this, and I think if these guys were American they might be rather "popular" on some level. So hopefully they'll get some more recognition in the near future, because it's really lame that great bands from outside the US are so often overlooked. (7/10)
Running time - 45:00 (approximately), Tracks: 33
[Notable tracks: Solitudine, Vittima del Nulla, Never Been My Friend, Evolution of a Situation, Tra di Voi, Without Answers]
Dufresne Records - http://www.dufresneattack.com

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