OvO - Cor Cordium
Supernaturalcat
Avant-garde
10 songs (43:46)
Release year: 2011
OvO, Supernaturalcat
Reviewed by Charles
If the idea of an avant-metal epitaph to the nineteenth century Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley leaves you cold, then look away now… That’s right, get lost, Philistines! To the rest of you, now that the plebs are gone, let us proceed!

Italian experimental duo OvO’s latest is, of course, not for the casual listener, constructed largely from an assortment of atonal bangings, harrowingly high-pitched vibratos, long passages of formless white noise, and a truckload of killer old-school metal riffs! (One of these is a lie). The band are veteran collaborators with some of the more esoteric acts to grace the lunatic fringes of the metal and rock scenes- Zu, Lightning Bolt, Nadja, Jarboe, and so on and so forth. This record, though, despite dripping with brow-furrowing listener-unfriendliness at every turn, is surprisingly enjoyable. Rather than drowning you like a bagged kitten in a sea of interminable introversion, the ten tracks here are concise and diverse. Each one is a self-contained blurt of oddness, like a series of surrealist canapés (although this idea has already been done rather well by Mike Patton’s Pranzo Oltranzista). It’s a sampler menu of weird shit.

The record opens with two-minute sound-vomit Lungo Computo, in which a flurry of guitar jangling, like a garbled speed-up of a Derek Bailey improvisation, segues jarringly into a completely tuneless post-punk groove. Penumbra Y Caos is a big practical joke of a track. It starts off as a queasy marriage of Stefania Pedretti’s troubling squawks and yelps to Bruno Dorella’s wasted sludge groove. But then it gets sucked away for a good six minutes of buzzing and whining feedback, until the very last moments in which the band suddenly decide to kick into a spasmodic five seconds of distorted rock bile. We even find a hit single in the form of Marie, in which Pedretti sings the same thing (which I don’t understand) over, and over, and over again, in increasingly mocking tones, as flatulent guitar noise and jittering percussion stop and start arbitrarily in the background.

Cor Cordium is an album which does not appear to take itself excessively seriously, and is therefore curiously enjoyable for an avant-garde record. Despite this, it also has some moments of real effectiveness. Smelling Death Around, for example, is a superbly atmospheric trawl through harrowing sound effects and deep, guttural guitar tones; if anyone were ever to make a genuinely surrealist horror film, this would be a mandatory choice for the soundtrack. Worth a go if you are feeling adventurous.

Killing Songs :
Marie, Smelling Death Around, The Owls Are Not What They Look Like
Charles quoted 70 / 100
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