Il pianto

Recensione album

Italy has virtually nothing to do with post-hardcore, but Blind Fool Love show how the style sounds in the country of power metal, cheesy pop, and opera. The EP offers moderately impressive guitar chugging and some required screams and growls, but it's mostly about clean singing and bombastic choruses — grim as the style requires, but pompous at that. The title track even opens with some quasi-harpsichord tinkling, and elsewhere the band prefers theatrics to rocking out — check out "I Viali d'Inverno," which, for all its distortion, sounds at times almost as if penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber after being bitten by a vampire. Such a mixture of aesthetics is typical for Pianto in general — its imagery draws heavily on gothic rock ("Vampiro," anyone?), its guitar work ranges from Seether-style start-stop stuff to metalcore proper to borderline post-grunge, with walls-of-sound crumble giving way to acoustic interludes. But the outcome is not as hot as one might think, just because the songwriting is, frankly, not that impressive, or, rather, not really hook-centered: for all their shouts and cranked-up distortion, Blind Fool Love are more inspired when it comes to drama than the hard-hitting rock that their style label promises. As a result, Pianto works better as a background soundtrack to inner tumult than a metal record, though perhaps that could count as a refreshing take on this kind of music.