One of the very best things about music is that quite literally anyone can make it. Your neighbor who never trims his hydrangeas? Could be a secret banjo virtuoso. That lady at the grocery store waltzing into the “15 items or fewer” lane with an easy 50? She might have had an illustrious career as an upright bassist in a cruise ship lounge act. Your distant cousin’s extremely flatulent toddler? Baby, that’s a future Broadway star. But the corollary is, quite literally anyone can make music, then it often feels like quite literally everyone is making music, and there is simply no way to keep up, no way to plot the full terrain.
This is all a gussied-up way of saying that I approached Fire Blades from the Tomb, the debut album from Italy’s Ponte del Diavolo, with an undeserved prejudice. You see, for as much as I love a lot of the albums that fit the style, Ponte del Diavolo has the distinct aura of that “occult doom/rock” jim-jammer that was all the rage in the mid-2000s (circa Witchcraft, Blood Ceremony, Jex Thoth, The Devil’s Blood, and so on). And, I mean… yeah, there’s plenty of that here. But Ponte del Diavolo have spliced the style with their own unique flavor, resulting in an album with post-punk urgency, loads of personality, and a grimly urban approach to goth.
One aspect that sets Ponte del Diavolo apart is the fact that they have two bass players. The songs are still primarily organized around guitarist Nerium’s riffs, but the two basses give the whole sound a different balance, deeper, twangier, tumbling alongside the toms. It’s rarely obvious, so the configuration never feels like a gimmick, but it’s particularly notable during the frantic sections of “Zero,” where one bass doubles the twanging tremolo of the guitar.
The other stand-out element here is the vocal performance by Erba del Diavolo. She spends a lot of her time in a low croon, but her voice is frequently multitracked in counterpoint with itself. She also often tilts into a wild-eyed goth-punk fervor, carrying the expected “alluring witchiness” of occult rock into gnarlier territory, some kind of space where Christian Death and The Cramps coexist with contemporaries like Messa or Sinistro. On “Zero,” Erba’s vocals are desperate, bordering on frantic, while the disquietingly sensual “la la la la” chorus towards the end of “Red as the Sex of She Who Lives in Death” is eerily reminiscent of Jarboe.
Throughout the entirety of the album’s excellently concise 42 minutes, no one element outshines the other. This is a band that puts the songs first, and seems to worry about draping them in atmosphere second. Album opener “Demone” blows in with the fastest, most black metal-adjacent drumming and guitar work of the album, but it soon resolves to that gothy, post-punk bounce. The rock elements are bolstered even further on “Covenant,” which opens up with a huge swagger that later grinds down to a satisfyingly hefty conclusion (backed by a theremin which takes up the song’s main riff).
“Red as the Sex…” opens up a lot of expectant space early on, hovering in a quiet, ominous zone where the guitar hums and the two basses interject fitfully, while guest clarinet features subtly in three songs (with its smoky undercurrent a particularly welcome addition to the heady lilt of “Nocturnal Veil”). The album’s centerpiece “La Razza” speeds along quite pleasantly, but ultimately it feels just a touch too static across its 8-minute stretch. But even in a rare moment like this where the songwriting isn’t fully captivating, Ponte del Diavolo telegraphs a thoughtful, obsidian-deep intensity, which peaks in a wonderfully stormy cover version of “The Weeping Song” by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.
Fire Blades from the Tomb is a bold, engrossing, fully formed debut from a talented new band. If you, like me, sometimes let your brain try to do the job that should be left to your ears, kindly tell that flesh-cabbage locked in your ol’ noggin to pipe down a bit and let the music go where it must. You never know when the next thing is exactly what you need to hear.
