reviews / 2014

CARNENERA - Carnenera

Name: CARNENERA – Carnenera
Item: Carnenera
Rating: 8
Author: Claudio Milano

2014 (Sinusite records)

avant-rock

by Claudio Milano

The album avant Italian album of the year? Perhaps even more than that: if it reached the ears of some major name inentourage international music, Carnenera (a direct nod to the wildest Burroughs) would have everything it takes to go a very, very long way.

The layering of drones on “William Blake” (who else but him to stir up such psychotropic narcolepsy?) will make you jump out of your seat. Pitch-black sounds layered with more atmospheric ones – also fantastic is Pissavini's distorted bass here as on “Duello”, a track that will arrive shortly.

Carlo Garof's percussion is drier than in the past, though it still breaks apart into polyrhythms with a geometric/esoteric, genuinely shamanic flavor. The ritual that runs through the few minutes of “La Marcia dei Triceratopi” with the goddess of song avant Italian Dalila Kayros, carries you into a genuinely “other” dimension. The doom/stoner abrasiveness (Ufomammut and the vast desert crossed by the Kyuss) leads into the metallic grind of the Tool, without forgetting the Crimson of “Red” brought into a 2014 dimension in the school of Ulver e Sunn O))).

Sempio delivers “surf” sounds on the aforementioned “Duello”, before shattering his sound into a ton of diaphanous sonic refractions, while Pissavini bursts in with a solo that puts any sadistic math-rock to shame. “Twenty One Thousand Leagues”, like theopener “Tilikum”, is extremely fertile ground for Sempio's layering, which rather than soundscape would need to be properly defined as landscape from those vast territories, at times magmatic and at others highly acidic, that have (re)brought Gary Lucas to the fore on “Other World” and from the crosscutting paths of Elliott Sharp, but his personality, which emerges as the binding element of the album through the relentless pursuit and attention to sonic detail lavished on it, truly has no comparison. You can sense a great deal of care, even though the trio clearly recorded everything live, with subsequent electronic treatments, like a game of refractions through a rough diamond, which allows the album to also have a thoroughly direct energy rather than one artfully “constructed”, as happens with most productions of this kind (“Nine and Then Some”, with a pyrotechnic guitar solo that doesn't shy away from using a tapping incendiary, is a case in point).

“William Wallace” again opens up into vast, sprawling expanses before exploding into a granite-hard rhythm section. The “Nordic tribal” choir of the central section is so evocative it feels like it could carry you straight to Scandinavia, aboard a Viking ship ready to launch an attack.

“Tre Gatti”, along with “William Blake”, is for this writer the peak of an album that is nonetheless extremely cohesive. Here the sounds flay the skin, and Garof shows off real creative flair in driving a world of rhythms devoted to evocation and power, even as he moves as if shattering dozens of mirrors without ever being reflected in them. This is another essential element of the record, which pursues a creative approach to writing even in its solo passages without ever sounding self-indulgent.

Carnenera evolves the language of many of the names mentioned above, as well as Zu, Ulan Bator (echoes in the post-rock inlay work, caressed by guitars in detune on the closing Self Harm – the closing arpeggio here is delightful), the Bark Psychosis of “Pendulum” from the unforgettable “Hex”, Rosolina Mar, Aidoru”. A language that looks anywhere and everywhere except toward Italian provincialism.

A special mention also goes to the striking artwork, courtesy of Alessandro Torri.

It's fair to expect this band to have an intense live schedule. Why? Because this is a record that will drive any lover of the “field” crazy: stoner, noise, doom, math, avant-prog and avant-metal, psych, drones, desert, post-rock... which is not only no small feat, but also guarantees a strong, immediately recognizable identity. Listen to them, go see them live, let them make you lose rational control of yourself to find something deeper that belongs to you: a darkness that smells, pardon, reeks, of light.

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14/07/2014

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Claudio Milano, 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