Sitting as always in the office at the end of my garden, looking at the birds and the bees go about their business, blissfully unaware of anything, after what has been a challenging week of work-related bullshit and triviality, I ponder…what would be the best to unwind. The devil on my shoulder, ‘Well I’ve always partial to a dollop of Italian post hardcore mixed with punk and Coalesce styled metallic flailing’s” as he empties his snake oil into my ear. The angel on my other shoulder flicks her cigarette into the bushes and pipes up, ‘Yeah that usually hits the spot”. Shut the fuckup I say, but then who am I to ignore the very personification of the eternal battle between good and evil? No one that’s who. So, I am sat here listening to Stormo’s new album the Carcass-esq titled ‘Endocannibalismo’ ’, which is as easy to pronounce, as it is to listen to.
It’s a captivating, angular, strangled, battered black and blue listen that just simply wont die despite being stabbed, shot, knifed, choked, and locked in an Ikea cupboard and dropped into the Mariana Trench. It’s initially really, really, off putting but I will be careful as to how I approach this initial criticism. The vocals are all sung in their mother tongue of Italian, but that’s not the jarring part, no, the jarring comes in the form of the vocals themselves which are high pitched rasped, catechisms of hate. It sounds like Fred Dibnah on helium, speaking Italian and coughing up a lung. It’s one part Converge, two parts, Glassjaw and nine eights something almost other worldly. It’s jarring, yes, but after a while, it starts its process of osmosis in a good way, working its way into your temporal lobe. But to be honest, it doesn’t really matter a tinker’s fuck what you think of the vocals, because whilst the vocals may leave you dear reader mildly discombobulated, I think that’s the point. If this were the band’s only modus operandum/unique selling point etc., then I think Stormo might be in real trouble, but luckily (well I think this is more by design rather than any fanciful notion of luck) the music is on the money, grade A, diamond level excellence.
Imagine a coke fuelled Fugazi covering Shellac, Botch and Shiner, and you’re somewhere on the journey that I have been on for the last few days where I think this album might be one of the best things I have heard for years. It’s spikey as hell, jarring, cold and sprints off down dark alleys to interfere with itself, shit its pants and then comes back to give you a hug. It’s punk Jim but not as you know it. It’s hardcore, its post hardcore, its screamo, its rock, it’s all these things and none. Its frankly astonishingly. It’s sublime, well crafted, methodically played and produced with warmth and love. It has transported me back to a dingy squat in a bad part of Reims, France in early 1997 as my band Mariachi, having just finished a competent but unloved set of post hardcore protestations to a largely underwhelmed audience, wandered the streets, sweating off the post show adrenaline in search of cigarettes, wine, and adventure. The promoter of the gig showed us down some rickety stairs to the basement of said squat, where a few hundred sweating, heaving souls were writhing around to the music of a feral band that featured two drummers, that created an unholy noise that had us transfixed, rooted to the spot at their brutal yet melodic hardcore punk that literally left all four of us speechless. I don’t remember their name (and believe me I have tried to remember but I am afraid like so many things, that memory has been consigned to the bin marked alcohol abuse), but Stormo, have left me in a similar state.
This is far from an easy listen, but like smoking Crack, once you push through the initial unpleasantness (and it’s not that unpleasant, and I mean the vocals, not Crack), oblivion awaits like a freshy scythed halcyon field. It will take some time for this album and their subsequent back catalogue (which is good but certainly does not hold a candle to their new material) to settle, but my word, this is absolutely cracking.
(9.5/10 Nick Griffiths)
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