ALBUM REVIEW: The Lost Demo – Zu
Avant-garde Italian jazzcore trio ZU are a hard band to categorise. Too metal for the jazz crowd, too jazzy for metalheads, they’ve carved a comfortable yet extremely obscure niche over the last 25 years, collaborating with fellow oddballs Mike Patton, THE MELVINS and Thurston Moore of SONIC YOUTH. Now, a quarter of a century into their career, ZU have revisited their earliest work; passed around on cassettes in the late nineties but lost to time, The Lost Demo shows glimpses of the band’s demented genius through a haze of frantic, nauseating energy.
In collaboration with Rome-based label Subsound Records, ZU have carefully digitised and remastered their original demo tape, making it accessible to modern audiences, but does this mythical release stand the test of time? ZU make their intentions clear from the harsh first notes of album opener Villa Belamonte with discordant bass and saxophone stabs intertwining into a cacophony of confusing noise, blurring the line between keys and time signatures before devolving into a squealing blend of PHAROAH SANDERS, PRIMUS and BOTCH. If you’re the kind of intellectual, experimental music loving misfit that gets excited at just the idea of this bizarre mashup then The Lost Demo has plenty of deep crevices to explore filled with deliberately off-kilter musical choices and impressive musicianship, the rest of the population should heed this warning: turn back now, danger and madness lie ahead.
The Lost Demo certainly isn’t an easy listen, especially when dissected and separated into individual tracks. The best way to enjoy this explosion of uncut noise is as a whole, immersing yourself in the bedlam for the just over 20-minute runtime, letting the peaks and troughs of energy through the five songs to flow naturally. There are standout moments on The Lost Demo like the extended bass solo on Cane Maggiore or Villa Belamonte’s hardcore punk style breakdown but these snippets do little to distract from ZU’s migraine-inducing chaos.
The years since their original demo have done little to dull ZU’s spirit, with The Lost Demo acting as a window into their earliest boundary-pushing, inaccessible explorations of contemporary jazz, industrial and progressive metal. Apart from the later addition of guitarist Stephano Pilia, ZU’s aggressively outside the box sound has remained largely unchanged across over 15 albums since the recording of The Lost Demo in 1996. If anything the rough, lo-fi edges of tracks like Shin Jin Rui bring across the intended sense of foreboding and dread better than the band’s more polished modern work.
Paradoxically the album’s closer Film Nero is both the most and least accessible track on the record, replacing much of the frantic energy present throughout the four other songs with a slower-paced, ambient post-rock inspired vibe. However, calling any ZU song “most accessible” is like referring to a cobra as “least venomous”; Film Nero is a nauseating seven minutes of saxophone infused prog worship with grooving, technical drums and piercing drones. It’s a fitting cap to an album reverberating with experimental intent, breaking free of ZU’s own boundaries and taking their avant-garde spirit to its logical extreme.
With their confusing, genre-bending mix of avant-garde jazz, progressive metal, industrial and noise, ZU not only pushed the boundaries of experimental music but shattered them. The Lost Demo is a glimpse into their bold yet cryptic and migraine-inducing vision that’s sure to scare off all but the most dedicated experimental music fans.
Rating: 5/10
The Lost Demo is set for release on June 14th via Subsound Records.
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