Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
When the Gods smile upon you, when the divine heavens open and shine down a radiance upon your hard earned talent and capacity to learn and grow, then no matter what your beliefs elsewhere, as long as you have belief in yourself that is all that matters. It is belief and hard work that have given Italian postpunk band Stella Diana such remarkable fascination and insight in their latest album Nitrocris
Post punk it may be advertised and shoehorned into but there is more than a touch of the bountiful Progressive attached to the music that may be first gleaned. Post punk it may be but the sound and sheer escapism on offer, the tantalising first steps that the album takes delight in alluding too is to venture a distance from the world of the post punk and instead take strides into a land where the fusion of British New Wave sits comfortably within the realms of imagination and speculation.
The album starts within the strangeness of the dark, it feels its way along the corridors of questioning, of inquiring minds and leads into the brightness of atmospheric illusion and truth; it is the Chameleon who penetrates deep into its own camouflage and finds that it can achieve anything it wishes because it has the ability to venture into a different space without people realising.
Incense may be a gift of the gods, however it is to found in abundance the more Nitrocris opens up before the listener; not full of enraged exasperation but in the mellowness, the scale of the music that the crack in the day offers. It is that mellow divinity that creates such beauty and in songs such as Sofia, F.U. Orionis, Aphrodia, Dedu’n and Sulphur, Dario Torre, Giacomo Salzano and David Fusco have created a piece of music that is tangible and alluring; Progressive but with the post punk undertones, the sweeping arrangement of thought but with concise appeal; this is what Stella Diana tenders and proposes; it is a gift in which to unwrap and keep sacred.
Stella Diana release Nitrocris on the 29th April.
Ian D. Hall