Jacula

Between the first cries of homegrown progressive – more or less successful mimicry of British and American models – and the handful of chords cobbled together by the fledgling Italian singer-songwriter scene, Jacula work away, largely unnoticed, on their debut album: "In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum". It's 1969, a golden year if we widen our gaze to Europe and the United States. Radical musical experiments and innovative sonic forms bear witness to a genuinely varied and multifaceted creative explosion. Captain Beefheart delivers his masterpiece this year, and Fairport Convention release "Liege & Lief", a landmark of the English folk revival. Groups like Grateful Dead, Quicksilver, Soft Machine and others are also delivering career-best work. All of this, however, is happening outside Italy's borders. Even in Italy, though, the foundations of homegrown rock are being laid (with constant hopes and ambitions, often frustrated, of breaking free from the cumbersome foreign masters). Foundations that the group led by Antonius Rex – born Antonio Bartoccetti – ignores entirely, and which it seems to gleefully overturn out of sheer contrarian pride.

There's an important point to clarify, though. The original 1969 album, credited to a mysterious "Gnome Records", is nowhere to be found, and it was just as elusive back then as it is now: the record was in fact never released, nor was it distributed – as some rumors claimed – to obscure religious sects. It's actually difficult, at that point in time, to even speak of "In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum" as such. It's perhaps more accurate to picture a kind of "draft", a work in progress that underwent changes so extensive and repeated that it's risky to equate it with the work we can listen to today, namely the 2001 reissue. On this point, Bartoccetti states that he heavily reworked the original material, using Doris Norton's digital system for equalization, noise reduction, and so on.

As for the lyrics too, there are in several places translations of Van Der Graaf Generator lyrics (compare the title track and the S.H.M. section of "A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers" on "Pawn Hearts", dated 1971).

In short, in 1969, according to the author's own account, the group set to work – this at least seems safe to say – on material that, after additions, revisions and interpolations, would eventually take the shape of the excellent album under discussion here, which dates, in fact, to 2001.

The imagery the group inhabits is the one typical of much of the dark and gothic scene that has delighted devotees of dark music over the years (from Black Sabbath onward). For Jacula, it's not, as is so often the case, a matter of leaning on listeners' morbid fascinations and fears through constant nods to the occult, nor of chasing success by surprising and provoking audiences with outlandish material. Their music is unsettlingly naive, an undistorted mirror of the band members' interests and their very lives, at least according to certain novelistic biographical accounts, in which reality often blurs into legend. Bartoccetti, who disbanded the group in 1972 (only to reform it in 2011 with the release of the album "Pre Viam"), reportedly performed – by his own account – in Romanian castles and Ukrainian monasteries, all the while steering well clear of radio and television. Doris Norton, the talented keyboardist nicknamed "Fiamma dello Spirito", would remain by his side until 2009. Serving as organist was Charles Tiring, who mysteriously vanished – again, according to Bartoccetti's version of events – in 1979. The lineup also included the medium Franz Parthenzy, who would be followed by others in subsequent years. But let's get back to "In Cauda".

Six tracks, rigorously titled in Latin, for roughly 37 minutes of music. No sung parts, just funereal spoken recitations. It opens with "Ritus", a fine synthesis of the two souls running through the whole record: gloomy patterns skillfully woven by the pipe organ – which keeps insistently returning to its highest notes, spinning them in a kind of mystical suspension of time – and harsh jabs of electric guitar, nervy and full-blooded, "Fripp-like" at times.

The second track, "Magister Dixit", carries the bitter taste of an inescapable ritual and the relentless cadence of fate. Sustained almost entirely by the ever-present organ, it's fleshed out with dark words that, while genuinely chilling, also expose clear limits in terms of lyrical craft. The stilted vocabulary and overly ornate syntax bring Bartoccetti's lyrics close to the bombastic excess of many progressive rock "disciples". The track closes with the leader's blistering guitar once again taking centre stage, so powerful and evocative that it makes us forget to notice the "footprints on the road of time" and the "dew of crosses and roses".

"Triumphatus Sad" sounds like Van Der Graaf Generator after a deep dive into the works of Aleister Crowley (and it would sound magnificent).

In the album's second half, even a little light filters through. Rare, faint rays, perhaps only there to better illuminate tombstones and shrouds. The tension eases just slightly on "Veneficium", which tries to unwind into carousels of notes tentatively sketched out by the keyboards, though these are soon overwhelmed by "King Antonio's" familiar, neurotic electric charges.

The next track, “Initiatio”, is for this writer the true masterpiece. Compared to what's come before, the tone becomes more relaxed and pensive. Norton's vocal trills settle over carpets of keyboards that feel more melancholic than macabre, marking perhaps a momentary surrender before the inscrutability of worlds unknown to us. No longer the mediumistic transposition into music of dark entities, but rather the disquiet of one weighed down by the invisibility of what is feared or what is hoped for. Almost half a sigh of relief, were it not for that icy wind lurking in the background and the ever-present, heavy timpani.

Closing the show is the title track, a long suite evoking incorporeal fairies, “spirits in chorus” and “lost treetops”. The organ repeats the same infernal, funereal litany, while Bartoccetti recites words drawn, so it's said, from otherworldly realms and relayed by the medium Franz Parthenzy. It's a ten-minute track, a crescendo of anguish and desolation next to which several Dead Can Dance compositions become harmless children's games.

In ten minutes there's also time to reflect on the whole album, assuming it's possible to do so calmly while spirits and devils pour out of the speakers, and to grasp the extraordinary singularity of Jacula within the Italian scene.

Of course, very few think of them when discussing the great names of Italian music. Jacula were never the ones basking in the media spotlight at centre stage, but it's well known that it's precisely in the most "marginal" corners that one can find treasures, or magnificent poisons. After all, in cauda semper stat venenum…

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16/02/2012