There are a couple of things that attracted me to Varego’s Blindness of the Sun release. Firstly, the stunning artwork by Marco Castagnetto. It’s one of those covers that your eyes just get drawn to and you then stare at it for a couple of minutes discovering more and more things. It shows again how important having attractive artwork can be. Secondly, the press release mentions some interesting guest appearances that I will come back to later. Thirdly, the mention of the words ‘sludge’ and ‘progressive’ in the same press release. And lastly the fact that this release was produced by no one other than Billy Anderson, of Melvins, Neurosis, Sleep and EyeHateGod fame among others.
There are 4 songs on Varego and from opening track ‘Hesperian’ onwards it becomes clear that this 5-piece of Italians are here to mean business. And with that I mean heavy sludge business. There’s some heavy riffing going on and some very interesting tempo changes by drummer Simon Lepore. The production caught my ear as well, as it’s not over produced, but kept quite raw and with the two separate guitar parts clearly distinguishable due to the slight different guitar sound employed. Davide Marcenaro vocals are on the hoarse side, slightly screaming but very good for the type of music Varego plays.
Marcenaro’s vocal range becomes a little bit more apparent in the second track ‘Secrets Untold’, changing from the hoarse grunt-like shouting to an almost gnarly black metal-like screaming and even bits of near clean singing in the middle bit of the track, which is a sort of slowed down intermezzo. Musically this track follows on from the opener with a huge amount of riffs thrown at you from all angles and solid drumming (including subtle double bass drum parts), again employing the right amount of fills and good amount of tempo changes.
The strength of this EP however lies in the second half as ‘The Flight of the I’ includes a special guest appearance of the free-jazz artists Giovanni Sansone and the final track ‘Of Drowning Stars’ includes a stunning guest appearance by the one and only Jarboe, of old Swans fame. This last track draws parallels with the Neurosis & Jarboe collaboration and just shows how well Jarboe’s voice and vocal range is fitted for the heavier sludge/post-metal genre. It would have been nice perhaps to hear Marcenaro adding vocals to this track as well, making it more of a duet, but this is only a minor suggestion. Jarboe is an amazing talent and demonstrates that perfectly again on tis track.
The ‘progressive’ part of the press release comes back in that third track ‘The Flight and the I’, including this appearance of Giovanni Sansone. His trumpet playing is absolutely brilliant and this track is an instrumental piece of beauty. The way it builds up slowly with the bass playing over the amazing trumpet solo, and then the addition of the drums and distorted guitars working together towards a stunning climax is absolutely brilliant and probably the most contemporary piece of heavy music I’ve heard in a while. Similar to ‘Of Drowning Stars’, this track draws parallels, although not with Neurosis this time, but with the Motorpsycho/Jaga Jazzist Horns collaboration (In the Fishtank 10).
I had my reservations based upon reading the press release coming with this release, thinking that this might just be too goo to be true, but Varego’s Blindness of the Sun caught me completely by surprise and is one of the more interesting EP releases of this year.
