ALTA ROSSA: A Defiant Cure (POST METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Sometimes, even before you've laid an ear to an album, you can sense that its discovering is going to hurt, leaving scars that you fear will be deep and difficult to heal. Such is the case with Alta Rossa's “A Defiant Cure”.

First, there's the band's name, which oozes a dull, visceral menace. Then there's the cover, which depicts a minotaur, a mythological monster symbolizing Man consumed by his most bestial impulses. Finally, there's this quote from Antonio Gramsci, which sums up the disc's purpose: “The old world is dying, the new is slow in appearing, and in this chiaroscuro monsters emerge”. While the founder of the Italian Communist Party and theorist of the concept of cultural combat was referring to the political, economic and social crises that shook the societies of the inter-war period, this phrase lends itself no less to the darkness into which humanity seems inexorably to want to sink, and which inspires the French to create a work as ferocious as it is desperate.

Three years ago, “Void Of An Era” had already explored the potential of this group of seasoned musicians from Besançon's hardcore scene (Asidefromaday, Horskh...), but it hadn't prepared us for such an uppercut, brutal in its definitive darkness and nonetheless riddled with aerial eschar, which far from emptying it of its teigneous fuel, covers it with an even more dolorous and punishing bark. One of Alta Rossa's great strengths is its ability to sum everything up in four minutes, rarely more. Raw and taut as a ship's jib, “A Defiant Cure” gets to the heart of the matter, scraping with charcoal hardness the soiled depths of a swamp where the vilest instincts macerate.

Robust and angry, each protrusion sinks into a sinuous gut that gives it a severe, implacable thickness. Exalted Funeral' is stopped in its frenetic tracks by a pulsating crevasse, 'Delusion' opens the floodgates to mortifying atmospheres after a raging opening, 'The Art Of Tyrant' is haunted by feminine melodies on a percussive base as bewitching as it is menacing... Following in the footsteps of the best Neurosis, Alta Rossa's album is all chiaroscuro, rumbling in its bowels with an intensity that feels ready to explode, coupling sludge that's alternately aggressive or more ethereal with eruptive black metal.

Impetuous vocals are opposed by polluted or massive guitars, while the drums carry everything away with their tentacular rolls, as on 'Stratification', which in itself condenses the band's approach. Short, ambient, ferruginous exhalations ('Dédale', 'Where We Drown Our Night') spread a sinister shroud which, while relaxing the listener, adds to its vitiated climate.

With “A Defiant Cure”, Alta Rossa feeds on a humanity in perdition to sign a post-hardcore album that is ashen and swollen, with the allure of an organic maze. In so doing, they have established themselves as one of the most promising bands in the genre. - Official website

ALTA ROSSA

A DEFIANT CURE

AUTRE LABEL

POST METAL