reviews / 2009

GERDA - Gerda

Name: GERDA – Gerda
Item: Gerda
Rating: 7
Author: Michele Saran

2009 (Bloody sound fucktory)

post-hardcore

by Michele Saran

A band from Jesi with a taste for visceral hardcore, Gerda recorded – after an introductory mini-album (2001) – a couple of mid-length efforts, namely an untitled release in 2003 and “Cosa dico quando non parlo” in 2007.

But the self-titled album surpasses everything they've produced so far. The band's striking lashes, long sessions in the vein of Neurosis, are so devastating here that they make you long for the grit of Settlefish and Fine Before You Came.

The intent seems to be to dissolve hardcore's conventions into hurricanes of tempo changes, furious relentless hammering, miasmas, oscillations and vocal regurgitations, giving rise to entities that mutate almost entirely (“01”). The labyrinthine “03” leaves no room for the rationality of musical form (constant off-beat rhythms, atonal screaming abominations, excessive guitar “phrasing”, whiplash bass lines). Blasts like the 11 minutes of “04” (however chaotic) are as graceful and sober as a sequence of avalanches.

Only in “02” and “05” do a bit of industrial metalcore, a few almost harmonic riffs and a touch of Jawbox make themselves known.

In the crucial area of the Ancona scene, and of Alessandro Gentili's Bloody Sound (the new Wallace), already shared with Lleroy and Dadamatto, this is a tellurian record – also released on vinyl – whose final message ultimately pays homage to the catatonic battering of the metropolis, with peaks of sublime disorientation.

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02/07/2009

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Michele Saran, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition