Destrage have been honing their madcap, increasingly masterful metal for years, but it was their 2014 album Are You Kidding Me? No. that saw them click fully into gear.
These Italian math-tech maestros have a penchant for melding jagged and conflicting rhythms with sublime melodies that bring to mind Aliases and Textures covering Biffy Clyro circa Infinity Land, and they make it sound easy. Every song on A Means… twists within a perplexing, polyrhythmic maze. You can turn a corner and be confronted with Mike Patton-esque vocals from frontman Paolo Colavolpe, the neck-snapping riffs of The Flight or an exhilarating earworm like the choruses that rise from the nettling guitars on Symphony Of The Ego and To Be Tolerated. In less than four minutes, Dreamers manages to recall Jane’s Addiction, Refused, Alice In Chains and Sikth in that order and yet sounds like nothing you’ll have heard before. This is incendiary, breathless and chaotic stuff that’s instantly accessible and maddeningly abstruse, yet never undecipherable.
