DELREI: Curtarock Festival (Live in Curtarolo, 07/26/2024) (Digital)

Reviews

1. 

   Reviews Editor – March 24, 2025

   From Foxy Lady Ascolta

   The Delrei band is a very interesting musical project that transforms music into an almost cinematic experience. The idea was born from guitarist Alessandro Mercanzin who wanted to bring the listeners’ attention to instrumental music that is too often ignored. A challenge that convinced Italian and foreign critics, leading the Delrei band to publish the live album Curtarock Festival.

   Ten songs entirely recorded live during the band’s live debut in 2024. The band’s musical style aims to be a symphony inspired by spaghetti western films set in post-apocalyptic contexts. A journey into a music that tells of desert landscapes and dark atmospheres. The mere presence of instrumental music makes the Delrei project a surprise for those who are used to learning songs by heart by humming them in the shower or in everyday life. But this is the beauty of music, letting yourself be surprised by the talent of new proposals.

   Delrei is the musical project of guitarist Alessandro Mercanzin (Universal Sex Arena, La Tempesta). The debut album, Desolation and Radiation, was released in July 2023 on the Portland Projekt Records label. A historically active reality in the ambient, new wave and dark wave scene. The album, produced by Maurizio Baggio (The Soft Moon, Boy Harsher, Nuovo Testamento, etc.), received excellent critical acclaim both in Italy and abroad. It thus established itself as a distinctive work in its genre.

   After the album was released, the need to perform the songs live arose, so 2 more members were added: Giovanni Beghetto (drums) and Davide Dalla Pria (bass), both veterans of the Italian underground scene. The band’s sound blends dark ambient desert blues influences with cinematic ones, in particular the iconic soundtracks of Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone’s western films, with the mysterious and surreal atmospheres of visionary directors such as David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino and John Carpenter.

   Their concert is an immersive experience that transports the listener into a psychedelic and dystopian journey where the intertwining of unconventional instruments (experimental guitars, vintage synthesizers, reverbs and the Marranzanu, a traditional Sicilian harp) creates a futuristic and fascinating soundscape.

   Delrei’s live debut took place in July 2024 at the Curtarock Festival, where the band opened for Black Heart Procession. Since then, the group has played in numerous Italian cities, including Rome, Milan, Turin, Grosseto, Brescia and Vicenza.

2. 

   Reviews Editor – March 8, 2025

   From Chain DLK

   Somewhere between a Sergio Leone dream sequence and a David Lynch fever dream, DELREI conjures a ghostly Western landscape where spaghetti guitars shimmer under neon moons, dusty highways stretch into oblivion, and every note sounds like it’s been sunbaked and wind-worn in the middle of nowhere.

   With Curtarock Festival, Italian guitarist and sonic gunslinger Alessandro Mercanzin takes his cinematic “Spaghetti Western noir” sound from the sterile solitude of the studio to the raw, whiskey-soaked energy of the stage, flanked by Giovanni Beghetto on drums and Davide Dalla Pria on bass. This was DELREI’s first-ever live performance, but you wouldn’t guess it – each track carries a swagger that suggests the band has been riding together for years, trading riffs like outlaws exchanging glances before a showdown.

   Opening with “Solitario”, the band immediately plunges us into a widescreen desert mirage, where reverbed guitars tremble like distant mirages and rolling percussion mimics the sound of boots crunching on sand. The following “Into the Wasteland” ramps up the post-apocalyptic dust storm, a Morricone-esque gallop through desolation, complete with sun-scorched melodies that feel like a lost frontier ballad.

   Then there’s “Nowhere to Ride”, a track that kicks up the dust even higher – its lean, mean energy almost punkish in its brevity and directness. But DELREI is never just about speed; “Ensenada” slows things down, a late-night cantina tune where ghosts drink mezcal and memories dissolve into cigarette smoke. It’s as if Calexico and Angelo Badalamenti decided to score a film where Clint Eastwood meets the ghost of Roy Orbison.

   Throughout the album, tracks like “Far from Here” and “Lonely Night” drip with solitude, their melodies painted in shades of amber and rust, while “Mysterious Traveler” takes us on a twilight journey where the horizon keeps slipping away, like a mirage that refuses to be caught. And then, there’s “Get Lost Blues” – a perfect closing number that doesn’t end so much as it fades into the desert wind, a reminder that every Western hero eventually rides off into the sunset, never quite reaching where they were going.

   What makes Curtarock Festival truly special is its unvarnished authenticity. There’s no studio gloss here – just real instruments, real sweat, and real energy. As Mercanzin himself put it, “playing live is always a rock’n’roll experience and a proof of authenticity”. And he’s right. These songs don’t just breathe outside the confines of a studio – they kick up dirt, roll their sleeves up, and hit the open road.

   If you love Morricone twang, Lynchian noir, the shadowy highways of Twin Peaks, and the timeless ache of a desert horizon, Curtarock Festival is your ticket to a world where rock meets Western, where every note tells a story, and where getting lost is part of the journey.
   
   Best played while driving aimlessly at sunset, with the windows down and the ghosts of old Westerns riding shotgun. -Vito Camarretta

3. 

   Reviews Editor – February 21, 2025

   From Lost in It

   Saying that Ennio Morricone, with that track that has continued to vibrate in my memory since 1968, just as the sound of that harmonica insists on vibrating, may seem trivial but it is not to be taken for granted. There are souls that mark our listening with their sound, Morricone is one of these.

   But it’s not just the great Maestro who crosses my lopsided progress in the sound universe of what I consider the ambient sound of the lone cowboy. The past year gave me the visions of Cowboy Sadness, in 2021 I went on a trip with Robert Levon Been and his dystopian soundtrack for the wonderful “The Card Counter,” a trip that continued with lust of the blues painted in very dark colors and post everything by Ethel Cain. I feel like continuing but I’ll end with the memory of a band that combined the sound of the West with the gothic, way back in 1987: Fields Of The Nephilim.

   Before starting to listen to Delrei’s new live album, I don’t know why but I thought of Ry Cooder with the unforgettable soundtrack of Paris Texas and it was with that predisposition that I put on the headphones: wrong predisposition because the recording of the live performance at the Curtarock Festival in July last year, it is pure electric vibration that bursts in, penetrates, sometimes annoys with its narration which is perhaps a little too real and classic western, but in the end it fascinates especially when in the shadows glimpses Mr. Blues stretching out his fingers with sharp nails to engrave again, decades later, the hearts of those who mixed vinyl and blues like there was no tomorrow.

   But what about the ambient which is the lifeblood of the writer? It may seem strange but precisely in the continuous and voracious electric vibrations that accompany the entire listening of this excellent album, in the visions that the guitar masterfully played by Alessandro Mercanzin manages to create, there lies the echo of the ambient gesture which slowly it expands driven by the determined thrill of an electric six string that knows how to provide temporal suspension, an indefinite parenthesis that allows yet another astonishing journey into sound. -Mirco Salvadori