There is a mysterious masked figure that stands out on the cover of Veti e culti, the new album by the Italian band Le Pietre dei Giganti out today February 25th, 2022 via Overdub Recordings with digital distribution by Sony/The Orchard. According to the band, “The title Veti e culti, in English translatable as Vetoes and cults, derives from the coexistence between what aims to control our lower and animal instincts and what instead exalts and celebrates them most. There is a game of lights and shadows, with the mysterious figure on the cover that alternates his presence, rising from the trees, with his absence, hiding his real aspect“.
The band was formed in Florence by Lorenzo Marsili (vocals and guitars) and Francesco Utel (guitars, keyboards and vocals), completed by Francesco Nucci (drums and percussion) and Niccolò Pizzamano (bass). The new album Veti e culti follows the debut album Abissi of 2019. Meanwhile, also thanks to the live activity, Le Pietre dei Giganti have acquired greater awareness of the sound they wanted to get and the images they wanted to evoke through their music. “We have worked carefully on the selection of instruments, on the harmonies and on the color we wanted to give to the atmospheres. This help us in the recording phase to be able to bring everything into focus“. So, the four musicians have forged a burning record that fully represents them.
Le Pietre dei Giganti dig into the stone and hit the listener with all the power of electricity. Their tense and solemn heavy rock features stoner powder and nuances of neopsychedelia, touching on the progressive of the 70s, but now more than ever pays also much attention to the percussive side, following a primordial rhythm, and to the electronic one with the insertion of synths and processed samples.
The tribal elements and the darkness have suggested the esoteric imagery of the album: from the contact with nature, from its most sinister mood to its transcendental charge, to the rituality in trying to tame it, attributing a superior meaning to the good and evil. “The concept of rite is transcultural, indeed universal, and is driven by something ancient that lives within us and reflects us, even in our contradictions”, states the band. This is a very precise imagery that has been ideally transported in the arrangements and found its perfect synthesis in the works of DEM, a modern alchemist of the figurative arts characterized by arcane legendary creatures, author of the artwork of the album. “The greatest influence for us was the art of DEM, placed between nature and spirituality. His masks and his costumes are the visual equivalent of what we have created with our songs. The idea of disguise is a bridge between the human world and the otherworld“.
The first single from the album is the title track Veti e culti, offering the eternal dualisms between light and dark. “It is a dialogue with one’s own shadow, the archetype that best evokes the idea of dualism, of the coexistence of impulse and reason, conscious and unconscious“. The videoclip of the single was conceived and created by DEM himself, making use of his weird masked figures. The second single Quando l’ultimo se ne andrà is a muddy and timeless blues, about disappointed expectations and the detachment from one’s roots. The track includes a re-adaptation of a poem from the movement for the emancipation of poetry MeP, found on a wall in the city of Florence. The lyric video, made by Winterlight Studio, shows the masked presences of DEM alongside the images of abandoned places.
Inspired both by European romanticism, from Gustave Dore to William Blake, as by the movies of Pasolini and of the Coen brothers, the lyrics are often dreamlike and give everything an even more ancestral savour. “We perceive the melodic strength of our language, but also its unpredictable adaptability to harsh and unusual sounds“. The nine songs on the tracklist of Veti e culti – recorded and mixed at the Monolith Recording Studio in Vitulano (BN), and produced by Filippo Buono aka “Phil liar” – are not easy to classify because they show many changes of dynamics. The points of reference could range from Ulver to Opeth, from Kyuss to Queens Of The Stone Age, up to Tool. There are songs linked together by the theme of the forest, classic horror story interludes, grunge metal for the apocalypse of the human being, melancholy brass appearances and explosive hardcore-punk breaks. Let the rite begin!
