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The seemingly lone supernova of extreme hardcore punk in early and mid 80s Italy feels like a distant, but crystal clear memory. Italy seemed to have found itself entering an explosive world of new musical freedom and continued countercultural activism all the way from poetry to paisan, with renewed license to be inept and irrational as a matter of purpose and intent, now with all expectations of beauty out the window. PSICO GALERA are no Italian-by-numbers band, though. Instead they have found a parallel signal in the equally repressive and ordered culture of Japan and their musical blasts of eccentric ugly bliss. Channeling the attempts that bands like BITOUSHA and early KURO made at aping Motorhead into their own vain image, PSICO GALERA add a twist, using the frenetic speed of the Italian language almost as an instrument, not entirely unlike the unintentionally Italian futurist tempos of WRETCHED. Here alongside hair-sprayed guitar solos, atonal polenta stains, and the rhythmic impatience of bobbing wrists shaking two pinched hands at you scornfully, PSICO GALERA present "Senza Via Di Fuga," their debut EP.
Our take: Debut release from this new project featuring Jonah from Fucked Up / Career Suicide on drums and a couple of Smart Cops among others. Obviously the list of members has me very interested in this one, but I’m pretty sure that this would rise above the pack even if it came from a bunch of unknowns. The tack here, ostensibly, is classic Italian hardcore, and it definitely has the loose and wild quality that I tend to associate with early Italian hardcore, but there’s lot more going on here. First of all, there’s an epic quality in some places that seems to come from somewhere else… “Mani Sporche” in particular has a very triumphant tone that would probably remind me a lot of Death Side if the production weren’t decidedly more on the G.I.S.M. end of the spectrum. Second, there are a lot of curious, slightly “out there” production touches, from the “underwater” effect on some of the vocals (they sound all wobbly, sort of like the guitars on “Come as You Are” by Nirvana), some guitar tracks that are obviously out of tune (“Voci Nella Testa” uses this to great effect, which makes the song sound seriously unhinged), and SUPER loud lead guitar overdubs. I’m always a fan of the lead guitar overdub coming in twice as loud as anything else, but the playing here is at least as interesting as the production trick. Oh, and they even have a classic, old-school hardcore dirge in the last track, “Nessuna Rivincita.” So, while this definitely does what it says on the tin in that it delivers a blast of wild hardcore in the vein of the Italian classics, I think that it is actually a very unique and interesting record beyond how it pays homage to history. Here’s hoping this isn’t the last we hear of Psico Galera.