On May 23rd Brucia Records will release Cor, a new album by the Italian black metal entity Ultio, the solo work of Giorgio Barroccu, who is also behind the music of Derhead. Brucia describes Cor as “the twistedly demented brother of The Grey Zone Phobia, Derhead‘s latest album released back in March 2023″. (We had some things to say about that album here.)
What does this mean? Brucia describes it this way:
Another side of the same, dark coin – Ultio shares Derhead‘s very same dramatic tension and despair, however showcasing here a magnificently unrestrained and raw soul: behind a gloomy wall of freezingly cold riffs and shrieking screams Ultio ascends maniacally, building a sense of impending peril and oppression – dissonance after dissonance.
That’s an evocative and accurate way of try to capture the differences between the elaborate and unexpected variations spread across Derhead‘s album (which attract the label “avant-garde”) and the more raw, visceral, abrasive, and yet towering intensity of Cor — though it too proves to be unpredictable. But we have more tangible signs of what drives Cor — two songs from the album that have debuted so far and a third one we’re premiering today.
I came across “The Grey Inferno” first, and found it breathtaking but very distressing. The drumming sounds like a combination of helicopter rotors going full speed and a high-caliber machine-gun blasting for all its worth. The riffing has a dense, searing sound, and other grand, horn-like tones elevate with them, collectively creating sensations of pain and turmoil on a magnificent scale, along with shattering vocals that are even more agonized and a gigantic rumbling bass that sounds like the crushing of rock.
By the end, the music sounds like the wailing of an emergency siren during a terrible catastrophe in progress.
After that I paid attention to “Looking for eyes“. In its lyrics it laments the submission of the individual to vanity, and the generation of “Low-fi mass products / looking for eyes admiring them”. The author looks for demons, and doesn’t see them. And maybe this is a commentary on the evolution of certain kinds of music and related culture.
In the musical expression, Ultio brings guitars that brilliantly ring, a bass that heaves the body, and drums that rumble and boom, coupled with scorching vocals drenched in vitriol. The music is mysterious and primally engaging, but soon enough it erupts like Vesuvius, drums ruthlessly hammering, the vocals screaming in fury, the music coming in waves of fire and agony.
Back and forth the song goes, until it lumbers ahead and also rises up like some terrible monument, and then splinters and shimmers, becoming strange — ringing still, but with dissonant tones that sound increasingly hallucinatory and deranged. The subterranean rumbling revives, but the chime-like peals of the guitar still sound strange, and distraught, and the vocals shear apart like the tatters left by vicious blades.
And now we turn to the song we’re premiering today — “A thousand times more“. Giorgio Barroccu has provided this statement about it:
“A thousand times more” is one of the most violent and evil songs on the album: a manifesto of what I think black metal should be. Lyrically it borrows from the phrase “we would like to kill you a thousand times – to the limits of eternity”, freely taken from the film “The 120 days of Sodom” by Pasolini. My intent was to condemn the cruelty of religion – subtle, deliberate, used to perpetuate its power ad infinitum.
The whole album is an invitation to listen to one’s self, to follow our instinct, as irrational as they may be and free from cultural bias. A black metal that wants to return to its roots, not so much musically, but rather in regards to the explosive charge of a movement that has perhaps adapted a little too much to society to be still dangerous and free nowadays.
This third single from the album is an immediate convulsion, a sonic apocalypse joined in media res. The drums blast like weaponry, the guitars feverishly writhe and wail, the vocals again split apart in torment. The scale of the madness and the pain transmitted by the layered, channel-separated guitars is vast, like a beseeching of massed hands and mangled voices.
Even when the drums briefly stop firing like automatic weapons and the bass becomes less turbulent, the music is still shattering, still wrenching, still expansive. By the end, it sounds like the skies are on fire and all souls are brutally dismayed and burning.
There are still three more songs yet to be revealed. They are just as startling as these three.
Giorgio Barroccu not only wrote and performed the music on Cor, he also recorded, mixed, and mastered it, and created the artwork (with layout and artistic supervision by Evokaos of Brucia Records).
Brucia will release Cor on May 23rd, digitally and in a limited run of 6-panel Digipack CDs. It’s recommended for fans of Marduk, Funeral Mist, and Gorgoroth.
PRE-ORDER:
https://bruciarecords.bandcamp.com/album/cor