My Review: Sacred Legion - The Higher Unknown

 Sacred Legion - The Higher Unknown

There are swaddled stars, afraid to feel pain, deliberately slowing the thought of death to prefer the silence of those gagged. When they turn into songs then everything sinks into the precipice of sonic paths, of elegant and malignant traps that use the class of hot metal.

The band from the Frosinone area returns for a record that kills this silly attitude of considering it gothic, Death Rock-loving and similar amenity when, instead, the trio makes itself the spokesperson for a conspicuous transformation.

It becomes an American comic strip with steps in Europe, as the children of Dino Battaglia, Georg Büchner, E.T.A. Hoffman, for talking clouds that, while moving very fast for only twenty-nine minutes, manage to fix an almost violent drag backwards: we find ourselves in the 1800s, with resounding anachronistic moves that obtund, skim over current events and choose the music that ferries everything onto a hypothetical sheet of paper. 

And we find Dino Buzzati and his Desert of the Tartars: the passage of time, destiny, the absurdity of blocked and shocked existentialism find their fixation in these compositions that lacerate the naive propensity for victimhood or pessimism. Rather, we are faced with a ponderation, a discipline of thought that finds support in Zeena Schreck, the true golden nugget of this bundle of compositions. A goddess who knows the spiritual path, the sensible theatricality that blends well with the music of the three, for a desecrating fit full of rust. 

And it is here that Giovanni Drogo appears in the verses in an unconscious manner, but with a precise sense of duty and obedience: these are songs that need patterns, study, a behavioural regime in which the need to give brevity the task of clarifying everything makes them ancient, almost punk, but certainly not gothic. And it is here that things become clear: the shores of those places where crying and feeling unfortunate made souls vulnerable are dead. Fabiano Gagliano rewrites the rules, draws comics, searches for Desert Rock more in the nocturnal dust of early seventies hard rock, which are certainly present, but there is no denying how in the poignancy there is a sonic simplicity that needs no tricks or flames: the sound moves in a single direction without deception, grating nicely on the thousands of bands that waste time searching for an effect deemed ‘right’.

In the album, the floor of notes becomes a howl, a howl, an echo devoid of pomposity as it is invested with a precise responsibility: to be a human and not a mechanical whole.

Songs like splashes of blood, of memories, of detected lies, of precise invitations that shock for their loyalty and depth.

I mentioned Dino Battaglia, and specifically that resounding revival of Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.

Well: these songs take up the trait of a fear that seeks separation from the nightmare in order to have a lonely course, to rage in the pleasure of attitudinal distortions (which are evident here in the grooves) and conclude in a genuflection with big drops of humility through a historical element that the Old Scribe refuses to define as a cover.

Instead, I would say that the song that concludes this second disc is a new switch, logical and sensible, to define not only a love, a good taste, but rather an opening and closing of a temporal circle in which the group rests its creatures within this historic song

Mirko, Tony and Fabiano take rock and put it upside down, not in a cave but in the hemisphere of a filigree that seeks continuous expansion. Scratching guitars, digging bass and drowning drums make the whole thing a nightmare, yes, but sustainable and compatible with the stage geometry of these nine splinters.

The whole must be fast, focused, in a rhythmic condensation in which the only escapes are given by two strategic moves: the recall of two travelling companions from the time that was and a song (well, it's not a coincidence that it's the shortest ...) that opens, and closes in a certain sense, every possible desire to go elsewhere. Sonic, spiritual art, that looks at tradition with respect, a notebook in hand and a pen to take notes. Nothing technological in this work, but rather a plow that digs among the clods muddy by existences madly lost. And then bonfires, witches, dissected souls, saving tears and aspirations as vectors of a well-being that knows the benefit of the doubt. If Satan exists in the verses of Black Sabbath (who I would not cite as the masters of this album, but only as a sacred temple to quickly turn your gaze to), here we find him in the reluctance of the from Frosinone to use the shadow zone to become obligatorily gothic. There is nothing gothic instead, but definitely an attitude to creativity that has only one obvious term of comparison in this work: the Damned, who made up their own stylistic citizenship without asking themselves any questions. The three are free to go wild, to cover their ears, to perform a zonal marking on the rhythm and on the historic psychedelic stripes of that crazy combo that turns out to be the work of the guitars and the bass, which, like nocturnal diviners, immediately bury what they have found.

A sound concept album, either for the attention to sound that must be an investigator, or for the frankness of an emotional framework that however connects to a mental universe made up of years and years of specific studies. Here is the trajectory of the songs becoming indifferent to the current condition. No photography, no evocative presumption, but a lateral look towards a non-world where the stories told are already intuitable from the chords and their short successions, in a clash that certainly makes them, nowadays, unique, without seeking uniqueness...

If an echo dies (the fifth piece of this artistic/human project), what is reborn is the choice, full of good taste, of not being ashamed of the limits of the present, of the approach distorted by no longer being musicians and writers of simple lyrics but connected to depth.

A bundle of the whole compressed into languid rebellious wounds, oxygenated by practicality and not by dreams: a powerful leap towards an evident sarcasm, a crowbar that uncovers boredom and kills it.

We were talking about two presences that make it all a generous Thank You from the three musicians and composers: Adolphe Le Duc and Matteo Bracaglia who are anything but last-minute repechages; they are flowers that fall skillfully between the furrows to cleanse, perfume and enlarge this emotional crater that makes respect a curve where, at the end of its trajectory, there is a sensorial embrace. Stoner Rock and the aforementioned Desert Rock (which are nothing but the elegant splinters of that Birmingham and London that between 1969 and 1972 would have landed in the USA like a relentless plague) are the primitive and most obvious stylistic suspects but then, like the wind that has no masters, the stylistic territories know rapid deviations, in a theatre that, more than pain, is a container full of slime, heavy distortions, even pop lightness as in the final track, in which we arrive at a miracle: on one side the band that wrote this pop pill soaked in glam feathers and on the other that alternative indie attitude that was the territory of the Pixies in their first steps.

References, stretching, for a muscular and elusive record. Above the Frosinone area there is a miracle that is going back in time to create an extraordinary event that will certainly not have a filiation: and it is in this uniqueness that an honest prodigy reveals itself…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

13-2-2025

https://batcaveproductions.bandcamp.com/album/the-higher-unknown