How does Italian black metal sound? What is the typical, genuine, autarctic formula for this genre in the Bel Paese? If you consider the profane trinity composed by Necrodeath, Bulldozer and Schizo, who set the nation on fire in the 1980s, we can get an idea of how italian black metal sounds, on average: a mixture of thrash, speed and black in which heaviness and hard playing is taken to extremes, which however doesn't renounce a vein of melody and pomposity, daughter of an operatic past very devoted to emotional drama. Just think of Neurodeliri, by Bulldozer, with one of the best intros in the history of metal, or Internal Decay, by Necrodeath, and finally Behind The Curtain, by Schizo.
For those who know the history of the genre in the country that gave birth to Leonardo Da Vinci, Dante Alighieri and Gabriele D'Annunzio, there has been talk for years of an ante-Black Metal Invitta Armata and a post-Black Metal Invitta Armata. Spite Extreme Wing were behind the creation of this collective, and the bands'split up in 2008 spelled its end. They are remembered mainly for this, after all: for being the first, extraordinary revolutionaries of black metal in Italy after several years of good projects which however tended to mention too much the much better known norwegian scene. And this album, Kosmokrator (also known as Magnificat II), was the watershed. Even today the importance of the album in question is underestimated, but fortunately a large slice of recent critics are admitting, with gritted teeth, how seminal it was. This is because in Italy we have a dualistic attitude towards our past. We exalt it and at the same time we are ashamed of it, descending into that arrogance cloaked in political prejudices. And Kosmokrator, conceptually speaking, is a bomb put under the ass of what we now call cancel culture, with his texts full of references to the works of Evola, Ezra Pound, Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Futurist Movement, who knew how to weave an art and a heroic philosophy in a modern sense, for their times. An extraordinary album, but how controversial!
Regarding to the music played by Spite Extreme Wing, we pass from the thrash/speed fire of "Il Tempio Ad Est" (and its great intro "L'Inizio") to the violent tragicity of "Kosmokrator", from the artillery fire consisting of "Deo Soli Invicto", who doesn't exempt himself in the expression of a some kind of epicness, to the sweet acoustic notes contained in "Vvltvs", from the burst shots of "Monvmentvm" and "Clermont" to the experiments contained in the concluding ambient track "Il Volo Del Bicorne". The recording of Kosmokrator took place in driect drive and, was made inside a deconsecrated 12th century romanesque church in an ligurian site, which location hasn't been specified. Thanks to this detail, the sound appears 100% raw black metal but at the same time full, reverberated, with a nuance of decadence mixed with superomistic spirit in the celebration of a past glory, of which nothing remains but ruin, and all of this was rendered in music. This is the poetics of the band and this is the poetics of the album.
In short, a black metal album that is innovation and quotation, past and avant-garde, violence and tragedy, will to power and contemplation of the XX century man's decay. An album that I listen to in full, almost to fill the sense of emptiness that the dissolution of the band left me. Give yourself the opportunity to taste this small, great masterpiece!
Eternal Hail To Spite Extreme Wing!
Sample:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXQYe9qtIvg&t=341s
