Viscera///, one of the most interesting realities of the Italian music scene, are back with an ep. One of the main characteristics of the band, led since the beginning of the century by Michele Basso, is undoubtedly its unpredictability that makes its style difficult to cage in one or another genre. In City Of Dope And Violence we find two songs, so to speak, canonically melodic even if the concept of melody in Viscera/// is something that can never assume conventional characteristics. In fact, both in Marauders and Spirit Of ’86 it seems like listening to songs by Type 0 Negative imprisoned inside a cocoon that forces the sounds to come out disturbed and distorted, with the same voice of Basso that appears counterfeit, as if you were listening to a 45 rpm by making it run at 33. The city of drugs and violence described by Viscera/// is not New York, however, but a more placid and unsuspected Cremona: the black and white cover, with the Lancia Prisma abandoned in a wood after probably having been the scene of some bloody event, says a lot about what can be the load of degradation that in the Italian province does not burst out as in the metropolis but insidiously remains at the margins of the clean and beautiful historical centres. The same central episode, a delirious overlapping of sampled phrases taken from an interview with an old lady, who tells that series of insignificant details that can become indispensable for those who feed, often unconsciously, the so-called TV of pain, resumes a similar pattern followed in the previous full length, when the recorded voices were instead those that overlapped the last delusions of the Reverend Jones. Even when they are of short duration, as in this case, the releases of Viscera/// are never trivial; the evolution of this band has been constant over the years but each step forward is the logical consequence of the one made before and not the result of an experimentation without a precise direction; this has allowed Michele Basso to perpetuate for Viscera/// a peculiar stylistic figure even in its mutability and unpredictability.

2018 – Third I Rex