Getting to review this cool album during the current heat wave, makes one hope of never having to hear a title like Endless Summer! It’s hot everywhere, so why not plunge into this chilling release from a hitherto unknown band from Italy. We have a Roman quartet featuring Piergiorgio Franceschelli on lead & backing vocals, drummer Massimo Mercurio, Salvatore Patti manning the keyboards, and finally Giorgio Simonetti on guitars, bass, lead & backing vocals. They began playing in 1992 and this is their second album; the debut came out in 2019. Busy with life in the meantime, I guess.
The intro “Pointe du Hoc” refers to a jutting cliff into the English Channel that is situated between Juno and Omaha beaches during the Allied D-Day landings, a strategic point that turned out to be an empty diversion. This not the case musically, as this is quite the sound effects presentation. Being an armchair historiographer specifically about WW2, I immediately grasped the exasperating tone of the premise behind this work, a vehicle that seeks to highlight the tragedy of warfare, the immense brutality and destruction, both physically, and mostly morally of all, the alienation of humanity.
The elaborate prototypical epic, running a luxurious 11 minutes and 38 seconds is immediately upon us with “Comandante Nino”, a tragic commentary on the subject matter, the cruelty of warfare in its most sombre uniform. Lyrical despondence, physical degradation and musical doom symphonics all combine with a beastly bass torment, reminding that the wind of war ‘was able to kill us more than the guns’, the regimental drumbeat feeding the meatgrinder, a distant flute reminiscent of gentler times. When the dense keyboards, the decimating guitars and the depressed voice enter the fray, while the pulverizing beat shows the path towards annihilation, the mood settles into the inevitable.
Three 7–8-minute battle-hardened tracks form the next group of assaults on the senses. No ceasefire or merciful rest on the catastrophic “Collapsing”, a relentless barrage of raging distress displayed by all the instruments in the arsenal, Piergiorgio sings with conviction, each word poignant, bristling with both unimaginable fatigue and inevitable blood. ‘Where did you leave your sons, no one remembers them’. Well, I do. Going back to 1213, I am the only male in my family’s history to not have been in the armed forces. But by the same token, human conflict has always been a subject I have strived to study and comprehend. I have come to the sadly verifiable conclusion that it serves no valid purpose, other to feed the delusions of power. “The Four Rooms” mentions choppers, so this relates perhaps to the Vietnam or Korean conflicts, two useless wars that only served to divide a population into two sides, one heretically still unresolved today. The full general grisly tone has not altered one iota, that lethal bass still marching along into the abyss, ‘flames were all around’ , ‘a sour taste of burning flesh’, rekindling images of Apocalypse Now, where the line’ I love the smell of napalm in the morning’ remains a lasting scar on the human condition. Pertaining to more recent conflicts, “I Watch You from Afar” perhaps underlines the Afghanistan struggle, first with the British, then the Soviets and finally the Americans, a hopeless task of nonsensical bloodshed. Men fighting goat herders, whose children were born with Lee Enfields in the crib. The dust is rising and nothing will ever change, since the dawn of time.
Two shorter pieces relive the tension, the acoustic guitar on “This Land” attempting to heal the life that is slipping into ‘the black water’. “On the trail” towards home is an instrumental that requires no lyrics, clearly indicating the hope for survival, maybe never being able to forget.
Speaking of survival, the finality of “This Life” underlines the guilt of those who have not died, who somehow have managed to trudge through, many soiled by the pain of losing their comrades. I was fortunate to have interviewed soldiers from various conflicts, the survivors who witnessed the most unspeakable crimes and how deeply it had affected them. Most told me the following :“I can shut out the memories of what I saw and heard but could never flush away the smell of death”. Many were initially unwilling to even discuss the subject at all, so deep were the emotional lacerations.
Go to a military cemetery (many in Europe) and look at the ages of the millions who have died. How many future geniuses are buried there? Then look at the map of that continent in the 20th century and ask yourself why did so many perish? This is a special work that merits a large audience to better understand the human condition.
4.5 desires for peace