Band:	Three Steps To The Ocean
Album:	Del Fuoco
Style:	Post-metal
Release date:	September 2020

01. Canto Ai Vivi
02. Dal Deserto
03. Fiori Immortali
04. Profezie Dalle Rovine
05. Dispersi
06. Notte In Pieno Giorno
07. Arcangeli Con Le Trombe, Diavoli Coi Tromboni

It takes a lot of fire to build a post-rock album that is still compelling in 2020. Or maybe it is because the world is also on fire.

Post-rock used to be one of my favorite genres a few years ago, and I would listen to every band that would have a long amalgamation of words, sometimes adjoined, for a title. I would've loved Three Steps To The Ocean back then, especially since they also use the threestepsbytheocean variant sometimes. But like any genre with more than a decade under its belt, it's harder and harder to come up with new sounds and for bands to break through, partly because bands go in the studio wanting to make a post-rock record when there's already an established post-rock sound, so you end up with something that you can expect from a post-rock record. So it's no wonder that it gets recycled and saturated. We even have a post-rock parody band in my country. So the only chance that a post-rock band has in 2020 is to be really really good.

Me returning to Three Steps To The Ocean is a pretty good indicator that they hit something good with this one. From pounding bass and pulsating synths, Del Fuoco doesn't lack nor punches, nor a sense of grandeur. It often feels like there are moments where one or two of the instruments are on the forefront of things, usually the guitars on the more metal parts and the synths on the more psychedelic parts, since there are parts on this album in which it does take cues from desert rock and krautrock, like on "Dal Deserto" or "Dispersi". The latter also makes great use of samples, in a way that reminds of just how effectively these are when properly used in post-rock.

Even though they're more on the post-rock than the post-metal side, they take just enough hits from sludge and doom metal to make their post-rock heavy and textured, but without moving the sound as much into a metallic direction, which is weird praise to give it on a metal website. The metal elements being imbued so organically makes it feel heavy rather than seem like it's trying to be heavy on purpose. It doesn't come as much from massive muscular riffs, even though there are enough of those, but through how well the tension and atmosphere is built and how much of it flows so well to keep the momentum going. It's easy to do a crescendo with tremolo-picking, but it's not as easy to build and release that tension effectively.

Even though it's not doing anything revolutionary, Del Fuoco has much of what I would want a post-rock album to have in 2020, especially if it's following the heavier post-rock canon of bands like Year Of No Light, *shels and Red Sparowes. It's using it's heavy/atmospheric range to create something with flow and momentum, its production lets it pack its punches and sustain its atmosphere, and most importantly, the only vocals are samples.