Detailed Reviews [J’accuse – 2008 - "Abandone Del Tempo E Delte Forme"]

Prolusion. “Abandone Del Tempo E Delte Forme” by Italy’s J’ACCUSE is yet another debut outing to be examined in this series of reviews. Please don’t blame me for putting questions after the musicians’ names in the lineup above. At least at the moment, it is impossible to learn which instrument(s) each of them plays. There is no corresponding information in the CD booklet or its press kit, either; the band’s website is under construction, and even an Internet search doesn’t produce any results.

Analysis. Now that I’m already familiar with the album I can shed some light on the matter. I believe the quartet consists of a drummer, bassist and two guitarists, one of whom sings in addition, while another deploys a guitar synth (from to time). J’accuse seems to be a group of like-minded persons who are fond of probably anything that relates to Space Rock. The seven tracks presented all reveal a few different manifestations of the genre, but – bearing in mind its belonging to what we comprehend as Progressive Rock – none fully meets its requirements, unless we take them as proto-progressive creations. I won’t list all of them, since save that on the short opening cut Introduzione (the only instrumental here, it’s compiled of two dissimilar, yet still typically ‘spacey’ sketches), the music is quite uniform throughout the album in terms of both composition and arrangement and is a mishmash of Space Metal and, say, merely hard as well as completely quiet Space Rock with occasional space fusion-evoking moves. Within the sections with hard-and-dense arrangements and those with reflective ones, the music reminds me of at once a heavily modified and simplified take on Voivod (with hints of Hawkwind in places) and Pink Floyd, respectively. The rhythm guitarist deploys the intense, yet at the same time fairly straight riffing that might suggest Grunge rather than what I personally define as Battle Space Metal – the style the Canadian band pioneered in the mid-‘80s. To be more precise, he sounds like a hard-rock/metal axeman who loves Voivod-ian riffs, but is unable to reproduce them, well, in all their glory. The guitar solos as such are never fast, let alone pretentious, only appearing when the basic theme is smooth, slow-paced and plain all alike. The vocals (in Italian) are overall fine in themselves, but since they’re delivered for the most part in the band’s native art-rock traditions, they sometimes appear as being too laidback from the main musical events. All in all, I’m fully satisfied only with the battery commander – the sole musician in the band who seems to be always solicitous about the diversity of what they do, though anyhow already somewhere halfway in it the recording begins sounding pretty much the same.

Conclusion. I can’t rate this output lower than I did, as those behind it aren’t amateurs and are talented in their own way, possessing something that makes their music sound fairly specific even in its current appearance. When working on their first recording they simply should have been doing what is within their reach as songwriters and players alike, instead of having tried to enter the territory that only the giants of the genre have access to. You have your own special way, lads: just follow it in the future.

VM=Vitaly Menshikov: May 8, 2009
The Rating Room