4 out of 5

Label: Subsound Records

Produced by: Alberto Mattaroccia, Alessio Barbieri (original); Lorenzo Stecconi (remix and remaster)

Zu’s debut very immediately staked their claim in a scene with many players – an instrumental math-rock scene that’d been bubbling and burgeoning alongside various Touch and Go sludge rockers of the early 90s – but few who were toiling in exactly the same “…but with jazz” space as the band. This is an over-simplification, of course, but moreso as Zu branched way out into the WTF-sphere almost immediately after this release – Bromio – which was already playing with a lot of that same experimental energy, albeit confined between rocky walls. Bromio is thus much moreso indebted to hardcore and math than anything else, but there’s also a looseness to the compositions that supports that jazz backing, setting aside the superficial quality that there’s a sax (and trumpet, at this point) involved. At times, you’ll catch the limitations of this approach: shorter songs that are arguably afraid to go too far away from a punchline, and occasionally sinking into a kind of funkiness that, even in 1999, felt kind of Ipecac-y rote. But the former brevity also works in the group’s favor while they’re in this mode, as they play furious and fast and switch from horns-as-guitars to free-jazz buzz too quickly to try to classify things one way or the other, and helping to solidify the overall amorphousness of Zu’s sound. Key to this working as well as it does, though, is having some push and pull – another key trait the group would get better and better at – and the album tends to juggle in some breaks, if brief, to get your breath between onslaughts, building up to a nicely cinematic epic of a closer, ‘La Grande Madre Delle Bestie.’

I don’t own the original version of this to compare the release, but the Subsound version (which interestingly refers to the bass and sax as “reamped” in 2024, alongside a new mix and master) sounds incredibly fresh and punchy, while maintaining an organicness that’s befitting its original recording era.