My Review
Stella Diana - Nothing to Expect
"Nocturnal point of view
New Hope - Stella Diana
To describe a wave of infinite beauty, dark and light, we could start from these very words, like the shot of a race that lasts about 36 minutes.
This fourth album is a nocturnal thrill, a held breath, just like a necessary apnea that guarantees survival.
This and more happens in the new work of the Neapolitan trio, which, imbued with substantial novelties, offers us the way to know a continuous emotion, the trepidation which frees from boredom and the predictable to bring forth unstoppable motions of unexpected gems that rightly acclaim attention.
A propensity to enrich the dynamics and structures of music that is increasingly scattered within the places to which the three of them pay attention.
Everything flows into the richness that is not the terminal of a railway station but a walk through brambles, thorns, mud and various roughness. All covered with that atypical sweetness with which they have always been imbued.
It is maturity removing the veil, a showing of songs as one can show wounds to a friend: with firm decision and without stammering.
And it is arthouse cinema, and it is a divine painting, and it is also visual art which distributes its frames to the notes in a striking and effective partnership.
This album arrives and succeeds in changing the particular signs of the identity card of the three guys: they add the attention to detail towards colours that smile at comets, a marked propensity for reverberations and echoes managed differently and more effectively, the will to shrug off the verse and the banal refrain to give solidarity to the structures of post-rock, without being totally so, ending up being perfectly connected to majesty and richness.
Freed from the definition of being a Shoegaze-Dreampop band, all their great talent has
took different paths, enriching themselves and us, spreading in their sound paintings new ambitions perfectly achieved. Here are the seeds of Psychedelia, sprinklings of Darkwave and Postpunk added to their repertoire that I mentioned. They are no longer just kids who are able to excite, but adults who, growing up, are proving that you can qualify everything even more with an artistic project. And they have definitely succeeded.
I now take this beam of light to navigate in it, in each of its rays, since beauty must never remain closed on the skin of its own beat...
Song by song
Matthew
It all begins with a fairy tale that seems to be told partly by the Swiss band Leech, a Post-Rock band, and almost Prog on the other, but then Dario, Giacomo and Giulio manage to create an imperceptible change in which Vanessa Billi's voice flies through our pupils. Strategic, unpredictable, spectacular start.
The quiet before an acute beauty intoxication...
Sleepless Girl
I have already written about this song which preceded the release of the album. But it acquires more value coming immediately after Matthew: its pace, which is so grey, breaks the fairy tale, establishing the distance from feelings, messing up every illusion.
DZM
The line of continuity for Stella Diana is important, we know, and in this track we see it again, but Giacomo's bass line overrides the game of memory and certainties, conveying amazement. And Dario, with his vocals, is no less important. The drums seem covered in opaque rust and it is a new enchantment. And here, staring at memories, the three of them make a mighty leap forward, exercising diversification on themselves. They almost seem to salute their past and sow seeds of joyful craters in the furrows of our confusion.
Fresh and contagious.
A New Hope
As if at the beginning of the song The Chameleons had been put under a bell jar, Stella Diana comes out with a psychedelic jet disguised as Dreampop seeds, in an exercise of almost cheerfulness that soars over the moon to save the breaths of those who would not like a clear change in their style. But this happens and it is rhythmic poetry, where their artistic freedom finds wings that smell of serenity.
Delicious.
In Abeyance
Here they are, greedy in their amniotic flows, creating a jewel of seduction and pleasant embarrassment: all their growth is shown here, between the semi-soft dance of the bass, a strategic drumming, strings to cut the tension and surprise us, the voice that leans like a friend on our pain and the guitar that rises in the sky to become angelic and draw a new line between the old sound movements of Vini Reilly and those of the dreamy Jeff Buckley.
A slow flicker which hypnotises and galvanises our thirst for wonder.
Beleth
The shock to the senses starts with the roughness and pressing rhythm of Beleth, the Goddess of the lump in the throat. Giulio commands the sticks for a drumming that goes from 90s Indie to the psychedelic rolls of the Canterbury scene (Soft Machine above all), and then Dario and Giacomo tune into the channel of complicity, giving rivulets of sand with destination Clouds.
Absolutely capable of reinforcing the most devoted love.
Distance
The song which contains the largest number of words knows how to give space to the music, subtle and wet with the state of grace, to have the intention of using lies ending up demonstrating the sincerity of a growth that allows each of the three Neapolitans spaces where they can express themselves, while continuing to make the band compact. And so it is Dario's trembling guitar that gives way to vibrant cries, while Giulio's bass assumes the role of ending this journey with our knees bending in front of his firm fingers like a sweet slap.
When psychedelia puts on greasepaint to avoid being recognised, sublime.
Regulus
Robert Smith, the melancholic one, still exists. Having left England, he reached out to Dario's talent and gave it his blessing. And he must have envied him a little.
Then Dario's vocals suspend any possible connection with The Cure and new suggestions are rented, without comparison, and finally Stella Diana, free of what could have condemned them, smile and go away happy and able to be unique.
We need to feed on this magnificence.
Marianne
Unfair beyond belief, the three guys, after eight delicious and intense tracks, exaggerate, bad and dishonest, terrible, because they are certainly guilty of giving us as the last track of the album their most beautiful song ever. You just don't do that, you just don't!
But what happens then? A frenzy made of absent cries, of absent sound tears, of absent shouts.
What is there, then, inside it?
The light of life which comes to be dull, the back bends towards the earth and everything becomes a tear in flight, starting from the murderous, gloomy bass, to the snare drums with a bittersweet feel and the hallucinated guitar that wants to detach itself from human actions to become divine.
The apotheosis takes five minutes and fifty-two seconds.
It could have taken two hours: we would have continued to adore it. Without resistance.
Everything seems to be collapsing from Vesuvius: notes like bouncing lava, the silence that admits its debacle before this nebulous and articulated procession, where the simplicity of majesty cannot be stopped.
And when you listen to the album again, you start from its end and you stay there, for a forever which will probably end only with a new gem of their next album...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
February 23 2022
https://stelladiana.bandcamp.com/album/nothing-to-expect-2
