Day: January 27, 2019

“The man standing on the sand dune looked around, tightening his grip on his sharp spear. He thought he heard the guttural call of an Abzkath, a beast that hides in the sand, whose meat is highly prized and can feed an entire family. At that moment the three suns began to disappear over the horizon, and the man moved toward them, silently putting his hood back on.” This brief sci-fi image could be one of the visions that are provoked by Ligurian band Varego‘s third album entitled I, Prophetic. The group is on an almost unique musical parabola in Italy, and this record is for now the high point of it. I, Prophetic encloses as in a casket many melodies, a thousand changes of tempo and musical register, placing at the hundredth of everything a different idea of music, that is, a now harmonious now more tormented development of original ideas that strike the listener. One of the most important peculiarities of the Ligurian group is that it possesses a clearly recognizable sound that is fully formed in this latest work. In the previous records there were in nuce a lot of ideas that we will find here and that are fundamental to the development of the sound. If the listener begins his journey from the first song and ends it with the last, like a proper album, he will feel that there is a common thread, a sense of a sonic novel, a using various codes to convey stories that wander from one dimension to another. Many bands are preceded by their fame, but when you hear them it feels like stepping into the fairy tale of the naked king, in the sense that you are almost forced to agree that certain records are great, when in fact there is very little. On the contrary, inside this record that is the result of the work of people who, like so many others, sacrificially carve out time to play music, there are a thousand different worlds. First of all, the voice of singer Davide Marcenaro has definitely become an instrument like the others in the group, and it is fantastic, he sings melodies embellished then by the intervention of the other bandmates. The guitars have always been particular, but to call what they produce riffs is very reductive, one could rather say that they create certain atmospheres. Simon Lepore’s drums, on the other hand, approach the creative and performing peaks of bands like Mastodon and the like, and his is a shaking of the sands of time. Most important of all, however, is this sonic magma, this monster of groove, progressive, and musical mathematics, which in its passage passes through various homes, that of new wave dilated to infinity, post metal meeting prog with metal inserts, even bits of classic metal, and then beyond. With this record we play at a higher level, where few bands reside, and that is because of the intensity and musical vision that Varego has. A great contribution is also provided by the mastering by Mattia Cominotto of the Genoese Green Fog Studios, who perfectly understood what the band group wanted to say and what it wants to render. Endless worlds made of physically accelerated music with residence in the province of empire. (M.Argo 27/1/2019)

2019 – Argonauta Records