Fourth impressive full length for the Florentine La Cuenta, authors of a sludge doom that moves on tracks far from obvious, despite the real risks that you run when you structure a work in a similar way. Here, in fact, we find only one song of about thirty-five minutes, during which the guitar of Matteo Gigliucci screams and reiterates its notes, well supported by the cello of the guest Naresh Ran, creating a haunting and alienating sound fabric, well supported by the percussive work of Nicola Savelli, but at the end of the day, not even too difficult to listen to, at least for ears adequately trained. Of course, the music of immediate fruition is something else entirely, but in this work we do not find a noise as an end in itself and not even a series of sounds piled on each other against all logic, but a harmonic line well distinguishable, especially in the initial part, before the samples taken from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (of which Antonius Block is the protagonist) burst in, with the character played by Max Von Sydow (here with the voice of the voice actor Emilio Cigoli) becoming the spokesman of a series of questions destined to remain unanswered. For at least twenty minutes, the sound flow irresistibly insinuates itself into your ears and the effect is so suffocating that, when a change of register occurs, instead of opening up, your breath freezes before finding some particles of oxygen again; then, when we hear Block begin his confession, the scene is taken over by the experimental thrust, even if the tension does not diminish at all, it is simply fed by a more dramatic and only apparently less clear impact, overlapping with previously more identifiable guidelines. At the end, of Block’s touching dialogue with Death, disturbed by an effluvia of effects and in the last minutes by riffs of extreme heaviness, the only sentence that is perfectly intelligible is “don’t you think it would be better to die? “, resulting in some way emblematic of the venomous depth of this magnificent album, of great impact both from the musical point of view and from the purely conceptual, and able to return in full, as if it were the soundtrack, the dark atmosphere and the disquiet masterfully evoked with his film by the Swedish director, all this in the year in which it marks the fiftieth anniversary of its release.

2017 – UTU Conspiracy