With their first album Fire Blades From the Tomb, released almost two years to the day before De Venom Natura, Ponte Del Diavolo invited us into their unique universe: the occult scent of old-school doom, the tension of post-punk, and the mystical coldness of black metal dissolved into one another, eventually coagulating and taking the form of an intense and mysterious theatrical ritual. It is therefore with keen interest that we pull our togas out of the closet to join them in this new mass.
The opening moments of De Venom Natura are haunted by Sergio Bertani's theremin (from the avant-garde post-metal project Lucynine), an instrument that immediately evokes parallel realities, distant planets, and haunted houses from Gothic films of the 1960s and 1970s. This misty gateway barely has time to make us understand that we are on the threshold of a strange, magical, and dangerous world before it is shattered by a furious black metal assault. As on its predecessor, Ponte Del Diavolo starts off strong. Little by little, the ingredients fall into place as Erba Del Diavolo begins to cast her spell. Imagine bands like Dool, The Devil's Blood, or even Messa gathering around midnight to sacrifice babies and play black metal while listening to The Fields of the Nephilim or Siouxsie & the Banshees, and you'll have a rough idea of the picture.
We still love this sense of grandiloquence, of an occult mass being performed in the darkness of a crypt. Lunga Vita Alla Necrosi and Il Veleno Della Natura, with their post-punk rhythms (the band plays with two bassists), their screeching deathrock-style guitars, and their expressive, emphatic Italian vocals, are striking and will delight crows. Ponte Del Diavolo varies the pleasures, both by mixing influences and by inviting various instruments to make each piece a new number, a new act in this esoteric play. The trombone that underscores Spirit, Blood, Poison, Ferment!, or the enigmatic clarinet of Delta-9 (161) (here, if you are familiar with the obscure things that happen in Italy, you already know that we owe this clarinet to Vittorio Sabelli of Dawn of a Dark Age, Incantvm, and A. M.E.N.) or the arrival of Gionata Potenti, aka Omega from Nubivagant, on the sinister and hypnotic Silence Walk With Me, thus outline the contours of a gothic and timeless nocturnal cabaret while stretching the boundaries of the group to a collective of artists, loyal collaborators who we are delighted to find in each other's projects.
While De Venom Natura broadly follows the formula of its predecessor, improving upon it, it is also a more bizarre, more daring album. The synth at the end of Il Veleno Della Natura seems to serve as a transition to the psychedelic trip of Delta-9 (161) and its recitation of the chemical formula for THC, with a solemn heaviness that builds throughout its nine hallucinatory minutes. There's never a dull moment, as each track brings a new idea and renews our interest. The album is therefore full of memorable moments, each one distinct from the next.
Once is an anecdote. Twice in a row is a strange coincidence: we'll wait for the next album before talking about tradition, as Ponte Del Diavolo once again completes its ritual with a cover. After Nick Cave's “doomified” version, it's Bauhaus's In the Flat Fields that has been reinvented with a mystical twist, heavier and more incisive. This is enough to make us eagerly await a third album to find out who the Italians will invoke next! In the meantime, we can savor the misty labyrinths of De Venom Natura, an album in which we lose ourselves as if in a Dario Argento film, with its gothic refinements, enigmas, and outbursts of violence.
