Inanimate is an ep by Naga dating back to last summer, when it was published only in vinyl in limited edition of 100 copies for Lay Bare Recordings; recently has been put on the market by Everlasting Spew Records the cd version, also containing an exclusive track for this edition. Although we have dealt at the time of IYE the excellent Hēn, the only full length released so far by the Neapolitan band, we have not intercepted Inanimate at the time of its first release so we try to remedy now, taking into account the fact that its contents have already been widely discussed by several parties last year. What we can add to what we already know is that Naga, even if their production is still small, have already acquired an important status that allowed them, for example, to open for Candlemass in their recent date in Brescia. Listening to Inanimate confirms that this status turns out to be anything but usurped: the interpretation of doom by the Neapolitan trio is obviously not as traditional as that of the Swedish “fathers”, but uses a heavy sludge component without neglecting some episodes of black hardcore matrix. Thrives, opening track of the work, is sufficiently emblematic of the musical style of Naga, with its dense sound, full of a tension that always seems on the verge of exploding in its roar but remains, however, dangerously compressed within its caliginous envelope. Hyele follows a not dissimilar pattern but it is imbued with a more canonical doom component, with heavy riffs like anvils in its descending part, while the black hardcore accelerations of Loner are preparatory to the hallucinated cover of Fang, The Money Will Roll Right In. The unreleased track, Worm, instead, brings back to the roots of sludge and confirms the goodness of the stylistic path undertaken by Naga, stabilizing them among the leading exponents of a genre that, in our country, is producing more and more delicious fruits.

2016 – Lay Bare Recordings