I really don’t have a convincing explanation to justify the reason why a southern European country like Italy has produced so many good post punk bands particularly shoegaze ones Metaphysics put aside Italy is definitely producing a varied and thrilling creative sonic reality which can easily compete with many of the very best that have been made in the UK during the glorious years of first shoegaze wave. Italian shoegaze offers a rich palette of bands pointing for new delightful dominions widening the sonic frontiers of the genre.
Hailing from the city of Catania in the east coast of Sicily (Italy) Marco Chisari (vocals and bass), Mario Lo Faro (guitars), Piergiorgio Campione (synthesizers, keyboards and backing vocals) and Andrea Conti (drums) long-time close friends are the core substance of CLUSTERSUN. These four friends started rehearsing by the early shrieks of 2013 but their strong human interconnection and common musical background worked out as the magic potion to get things done faster than the band could have ever expected.
Lucky enough to have muso parents listening to The Beatles and Pink Floyd rather than to the mainstream Italian music this true gang of four friends became curious about new music and this curiosity made them discover The Velvet Underground and further on a bunch of bands influenced by VU.
Suddenly the gang of four from Catania was listening to Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and Ride but also Joy Division, New Order and The Cure. One easily understands that after all this intensive learning under the influence of such bands the gang of four friends would want to start a band with a crush for post-punk, psychedelia, krautrock, dream pop, noise rock and shoegaze.
So it is not surprising at all that once they emerged as CLUSTERSUN that their sound worked as an invitation to a sonic canvas in the shape of a wall of sound where brush strokes reverberate psychedelic dream pop shoegazed melodic textures. Soon after first rehearsals the band self produced what would be their debut single Be Vegetal included in the 2013 Summer Sampler post-punk, psych, garage and the indie alternative compilation released by Custom Made Music, the highly respected American indie label run by Dave Allison, which has an impressive artist catalogue where one can find among many others bands such like Ceremony, Ringo Deathstarr, Dead Leaf Echo and Peter Hook & The Light.
The year of 2013 proved to be quite crucial to the band since it marked their signing with Seahorse Recordings the Italian indie label run by the legendary Paolo Messere leader of seminal Italian underground band "Blessed Child Opera" who also mixed and masterly produced CLUSTERSUN highly acclaimed debut album “Out of Your Ego”.
The album features eight nicely crafted tracks: Hipgnosis, Meteors, Be Vegetal, Planar I, Nebula, Floating, Planar II and Clustersun. All the songs denote a simple, classic but effective dark drumming beat design, backed by cohesive syncopated bass lines sparing room for the edgy cold, glassy guitars and the fat analog synthetizers, all of this topped with melodic vocals perfectly fitting the overall urban post punk psychedelic mood of CLUSTERSUN.
“Out of Your Ego” offers the listener a very pleasant and stimulating aural experience because when you have years of music in your ear drums, it’s only inevitable to dig not for comparisons, but for influences and sometimes you find stuff that even the musicians do not perceive as an influence though that is not the case with CLUSTERSUN for they clearly acknowledge their sonic roots. We’d say they managed to fuse The Cure (their most notorious influence) with MBV and Ride adding to this recipe some aspects of Pink Floyd, and details of Siouxsie and The Banshees, Joy Division and even Faith No More (the synthesizer in Planar I is so Midlife Crisis).
CLUSTERSUN blend psychedelic soundscapes with shoegaze and post punk through noisy melodies going from chorus-delay atmospheric ambient to fuzzy-reverb-distortion this makes Out of Your Ego an ingenious, beautiful, poetic and excellently produced album. What a brilliant work! The year of 2014 was a landmark in CLUSTERSUN's career because of their brilliant debut album although 2015 has also begun quite well with their participation in the superb Revolution - The Shoegaze Revival curated by Shauna McLarnon (of Ummagma) and Marc Joy (of Lights That Change) who have teamed up with the UK’s Ear to Ear Records and Indonesian label Gerpfast Kolektif released last February.