CVLT Nation’s Top 6
Italian Releases of 2013

ONE: Dopo L’Apnea by BUIOINGOLA

We’ve talked about this release abundantly here, and it would be superfluous and redundant to keep bragging on about how insanely awesome this release by the young trio from Pisa is. A debut album that represents the crowning achievement in Italian underground metal in 2013, by far, without the barest shadow of a doubt. Buioingola have made an incredible statement in the world of dark and atmospheric metal with this debut album of theirs, and anyone who is in love with the more apocalyptic, gloomy and depressed sides of crust and doom should put Dopo L’Apnea on their year’s end top albums lists. For all fans of Planks, Altar of Plagues, Fall of Efrafa, Year of No Light and the such. Let the shadows spill in.

TWO: The Self-Titled debut of END OF A SEASON 

This album from the young post-screamo/crust band End of a Sason from Reggio Emilia, northern Italy, will hit you like the snap of a whip right in the fucking eyes. This bleeding and excruciating post-hardcore album will force you into submission with a merciless mauling of metallic hardcore, crust and noise rock that you will not be able to escape in any way. The desperate and raging female vocals mixed with the Botch-meets-Converge-meets-The Jesus Lizard guitar attack create a formula that can reduce your sanity to shreds and that blasts out of your speakers with such force and violence that you feel like the band’s wrath is literally reaching out for your neck to strangle you to death. Frontwoman Marcella delivers the performance of the year when it comes to aggressive vocals. Her delivery is fucking immense, and her rage and desperation feel so real it hurts. All while her bandmates erect a vortex of savage noise all around her. At times shit gets really eerie and atmospheric, the tempos slow down to a hallucinating coma and everything seems to collapse under surreal rainfall of atmospheric bliss, just how you would find it in early Isis albums or in the dark and abyssal sonic patterns of later Starkweather. Fans of bands like The Secret, Deafheaven and Integrity will love this shit and so will anyone who loved the whole HydraHead Records roster of the late 90’s – early 00’s.

THREE: Split Album by AUSTERITY and BLACK TEMPLE  BELOW

This one’s for the  rotten ones. What we have here is a split between two bands that are so fucking sad, emaciated sounding, depressed and deprived of any light that you will be feel the misery dripping from the ceiling when listening to this shit. Austerity kick off the ordeal with Those Nightmares Rides With You, Europa, a solemn and completely lightless anthem of corrosive and emaciated doom. Shit gets so depressed in this track you’ll feel like the band cast a spell on you or something or plunged you into some sort of twisted and hallucinating depression, as it feels almost impossible to escape the misery and fucking titanic sadness the song conveys. This track will be an absolute must to hear for all the fans of all things damned and doomed: funeral doom, death-rock, slowcore, drone, depressive black metal, dark wave and so on. An absolute triumph of endless sadness and misery. Black Temple Below, on the other hand, shuffles things up on the violent side of things. Their worm-ridden doomy crust sounds like an avalanche of corpses rolling down a hill where you stand at the bottom, about to be fucking covered in a hellish overload of rotten scum. Morbid Dreams Of The Unknown blends Eyehategod, Buzzov-en, Cavity, early Cathedral, Corrupted and Moss to devastating effects, erecting a huge wall of hateful, corroded and caustic sludge-doom scum. This band features members of Italian death-crust favorites Cancer Spreading, so come and fucking get it!

FOUR: 2013 Demo  by  TUTTI I COLORI DEL BUIO

Another awesome release we’ve talked about abundantly here comes from Tutti I Colori Del Buio from Turin, northern Italy, and the band name – All The Colours of Darkness – pretty much says it all anyway. Four tracks of vile, spiteful, barbed wire-wrapped, warzone-like hardcore malevolence. A demo so fucking steeped in rage and angst that it will make your ear drums pop like fucking balloons and make you run for cover under a hail of falling hammers. This demented and vile quartet of madmen feature members of favorite Italian sludge and hardcore bands like Last Minute To Jaffna, Magdalene, Lora and Marmore, and this demo is an absolute must for all fans of spiteful and belligerent metallic hardcore like Nails, Trap Them, Dead in the Dirt and so on.

FIVE: Age of Collapse by HOLY

Another fucking hateful spasm of lurid and crippled hardcore-punk devastation. Holy from Milan are a hardcore band that in it’s angular, spastic, furious and unpredictable sonic clobbering can be assimilated to bands like Baptists, Alpinist, Jungbluth, Centuries, From Ashes Rise and so on. One stab after another, in Age of Collapse this band delivers short, furious, dark and fucking angst-ridden blasts of malevolent and violent hardcore punk that yield enough violence and vengeful belligerence to leave you fucking crippled and beat down for days. Four vegan, straight-edge punk warriors from northern Italy that are not to be fucked with in any way.

SIX:  Pisma Myortvogo Cheloveka by GRAAD

This one is for all the isolationist misanthropes out there. Graad is a one-man atmospheric black metal band from Bologna central Italy, conceived and developed by the mysterious Bøulevard Pasteur, someone who has no idea what light or hope is and who has designed and engineered over the years a project so lightless, beat down, desolated and depressed that just listening to this last chapter of his mortiferous art makes you feel like you want to slither into a hole of misery and die there away from the world. Graad truly brings together the best aspects of depressive black metal like Hate Forest, Drudkh, early Shining, Striborg and Xasthur, only to then inject the whole primordial black metal backdrop this music uses with lethal injection of dark ambient noise and abstract soundscaping. The result is reminiscent of Wrndlrd, Sutekh Hexen, Aderlating and Wold but with a much more abstract and immaterial touch that makes everything more oniric, but in a nightmarish and hallucinating kind of way. Highly recommended to all fans of blackened-noise, depressive black metal and dark ambient.