Wednesday 18 June 2014

Why? - L'Uomo Appeso (1995) / 74%

Italian penile thrashy avant garde metal


Why I am reviewing this?  Well, it deserves to be since it's underrated stuff and I hope I'll help giving them a tiny bit of exposure through my review. The Italian quartet managed to stay alive for six years releasing four demos during their existence and outside of Alexandro Naitina who's in the excellent post metal band The End of Six Thousand Years, the musicians kept quiet. It's kind of a shame since they were pretty damn interesting, they need a re-release of their material as soon as possible!

L'Uomo Appeso (the hanging man) is their fourth and latest demo and it's perhaps the one with the largest avant garde/alternative metal influences in their discography. To my knowledge, all their lyrics are in Italian but this is the only one with all the titles in this romantic languages. The singer is pretty unorthodox, maybe akin to Faith No More's Mike Patton. It's a clean & fast paced delivery with some spoken vocals influences. He's not quite my style of vocalists for thrash but he fits the Voivodian approach the band was aiming for. Combined with the poetic but weird for metal language, he's probably one of the reasons this band never made it big but eh, he's probably as good as Snake! (Snake is obviously the weakest part of the Quebecois proggers.)

There's a huge funk influence in their sound, quite apparent in the song “La Giostra”, there's these groovy keys intertwined with the heavy bass presence but sadly the low production (still their best) wasn't truly able to transpose their vision as much as they wanted to. Their sound also has some post punk elements thrown in the mix making the avant garde tag warranted since even if it's fairly technical, it's not spastic thrash but rather weird, fucked up and fun stuff. This is almost not metal in some places, the guitars are often buried by the bass and the vocal declarations and the fact there's only one guitarist left in the lineup compared to their other demos probably influenced the metallic amount of this one.

The structure of the demo is quite strong, it's starting and ending with nice instrumental songs, the compositions are mostly on the short side and the rhythm is fast paced. I'm not quite sure I would be able to withstand a long release of these guys, thirty minutes is even perhaps too much for me, it's a bit grating at times due to the vocals and it's not easy to get into.

Nonetheless, Why? is a very fun band, perhaps underwhelming in some places but that's probably due to the release being a demo, getting a do it yourself production wasn't as easy twenty years ago. Out of old school thrash, avant garde meta or Voivod albums to check out? Listen to these Italians.

I have three of their demos that you can guys can download here: On my Dropbox

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