DRESDA - Diluvio

To the average Italian, Genoa is the port par excellence of the peninsula, the place of landings and departures, of farewells and escapes, of incoming cargo and shipyards: in short, perhaps the greatest and most important gateway to the world by sea in the country. But Genoa has also historically been one of Italy's most prolific artistic cradles, especially in the musical universe, where an unrivaled singer-songwriter tradition sits alongside a fertile underground rock scene, as populated as it is ignored by most. It is from this kind of background that Dresda emerge, a quartet formed in 2005 that first made its way onto the record scene three years later.

"Diluvio" actually reaches us some twenty-four months late, sent with the humility of a band that still has a long road ahead, even though it had all the credentials to ride the best international stages. It arrives in a handmade package, for which the word splendid is an understatement, the kind of packaging that makes it hard to believe the dress doesn't make the monk, or to separate the two in judgment. In this sense we are lucky, because the distinction hardly needs to be made: the elegant garb the album wears is nothing less than a faithful representation of its equally distinctive content.

What Dresda do is take a cauldron full of black pitch with a sludge flavor, pour into it wild, stretched-out guitar odysseys that climb onto post-rock trails, and deliver it all with a lively, unpredictable, polychromatic verve that few would hesitate to call prog. It's hard to find a better term, hard even to find a definition to slot into the "genre" box of this review; it's easier and more reliable to let yourself be carried by the stormy waves of "Fili spezzati", surely the most concentrated and direct track on the record and perhaps the one best suited to sum up the quartet's aesthetic.

The opener "Piccoli ricordi" lays its guitars along the thorniest paths of Mogwai, while images shift in the background from jazzy math to pure soft-loud textures with such ease that you barely notice. The announced deluge turns spectral and turbulent in the epic of "Le strade dell'alba", polaroids of grey clouds and a relentless, uniform rain, which in the apparent calm of "Che tu sia per me il coltello", with its shifting time signatures, becomes less copious but decidedly sharper. In the closing of the title track, paradoxically, it is the sunshine that flickers back through in bursts, rays filtering through a temporary quiet before the weather changes again. Variety as dogma, in the typically Ligurian climate as in Dresda's wonderful music.

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15/02/2014