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Fifteen years after their fateful formation, Uncle Acid And The Deadbeats have carved out a dark and dark personal corner for themselves over time in the thick post-Sabbathian realm of heavy music, chiseled with personal mastery around concepts of psychedelia, doom, garage rock and occult music, in reality always followed with a completely eccentric attitude.
The tumultuous beginnings of the first volume and the subsequent “Blood Lust”, the sedimentation of his style in “Mind Control” and “The Night Creeper” and the experimental instances of “Wasteland” have also marked a fruitful and constant development in the discography of English, who, driven by the heavy effigy of the mastermind Kevin Starrs, arrive today at the most ambitious artistic project ever undertaken in a career however devoted to transformation and change. Uncle Acid's unconditional love for horror and mystery is certainly well known, as evidenced by most of the past texts and the iconography that has always been associated with them, but on this occasion the artist's lens turns focuses with almost maniacal interest on the iconic segment of the 'mystery' and the genre defined as 'poliziottesco', an all-Italian way of interpreting crime films particularly popular in the mid-Seventies, and addressed by Starrs firsthand.
Rather than limit himself to writing a soundtrack for a film that never existed, Kevin goes further, dedicating himself to writing a real screenplay that comes to life in the grooves of the new album “Nell'Ora Blu”. In a completely rigorous and faithful manner, it was decided to give Italian language and voice to all the dialogues of the 'film', even including the participation of some luxury names of the time such as Franco Nero and Edwige Fenech, gems with a philological which testify to the author's reverential care towards the genre with which he confronted himself.
Without going into too much detail about the narrative, we can anticipate that we are faced with a violent, vengeful story, set to music almost entirely by Uncle Acid alone on all the instruments, with very little space left to the other members of the band. The result is a radical downsizing of the rock matrix within the work: the function of music, more than ever today, is to enhance the various atmospheres aroused by history, definitively abandoning a rigid stylistic partition and getting as close as possible to the foggy Italian atmospheres that cloaked the films of those years.
Therefore distortions appear rarely, as do the interventions in which the band actually plays together: ample space is instead left to the oppressive carpets of synths that punctuate the dialogues, the disturbing melodies of the arpeggiators, long sessions with an improvised flavor and choirs harmonized songs that recall here and there the best compositions of Simonetti, Frizzi, Morricone and the entire immortal Italian school of film music.
Long, exhausting, heterogeneous and not very rock, as well as easily appealing practically only to the Italian public (given the non-obvious ease with which we can follow the events that happen while listening), “Nell'Ora Blu” is configured as a piece of the everything particular in the discography of The Deadbeats, a dream within the dream of their undisputed father which could have been released as a solo project, but which instead accepts the challenge of inserting itself with admirable coherence along the path of its mother band and opening up the concept of a column sound, heavy music and mystery towards new, excellent fusions.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM