In my interview with Steve Albini, I asked him to name a few bands from outside the US that he thought people should check out, and the Italian band Uzeda was of several that he mentioned. I had heard a little bit of Uzeda, but I was more familiar with Bellini, a sort of Touch & Go superband that Uzeda's guitarist Agostino Tillota and vocalist Giovanna Cacciola were (are?) in that also included Damon Che and Matthew Taylor of Don Caballero. I liked Bellini, so I figured I would also like Uzeda; I was right. Different Section Wires seemed like as good a starting point as any, and I was very impressed with what I heard.
This album is very diverse and well paced, and there is a sense of space and quality of expansiveness to a lot of the songs that was particularly interesting to me. Other reviews of Uzeda tended to emphasize the similarities of approach and composition that they share with other T&G bands like Don Cab (irregular time signatures, finger tapping) and Slint (minimalist composition, eclecticism), and while I don't think these comparisons aren't apt or warrented, Uzeda are not a sum of other band's parts, and they should be recognized as such.
There are dynamics and elements of pacing at work in this album that I hadn't seen in very many others that I've listened to; a track like Stomp (linked above), for instance, was defined to me in terms of "space" and contrast. The steady snare beat that opens the track remains a constant backdrop, but the elements that crop up around it, like Tillota's ticking guitar lines or Cacciola's subdued wailing, are few and far between for the first few minutes. When Raffaele Gulisano's bass kicks in around the two minute mark, all of the disparate elements that comprise Uzeda start to coalesce and slowly peak, reaching an apogee in the last minute or so of the song. The track after Stomp, Steel Man, is a bit more straight forward. It's loud from the very beginning, with the drums jumping out a bit more than Stomp, and the song length and structure conforming more to typical punk rock standards. Cacciola's tone reminded me of Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane, and Tillota and Gulisano's guitars lock together to create a satisfying slab of noise. The longer, spacier tracks on the album, like Stomp and Milky Way, provide contrast to the other faster tracks and slow down the pace of the album nicely, and serve to build tension that is then released by faster, more aggressive tracks. In all, this album was very satisfying to listen to, and it's obvious that the band was extremely deliberate in their instrumentation and pacing.
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