Varego have a new song out, premiered by Metal Hammer Italia, and it is not what a progressive sludge band from the Ligurian coast would be expected to put out. Sierra Nevada is a ballad, dark and thinly arranged, with tribal drumming underneath it.
The character the song is named after is invented. He is a homeless man that people call Sierra Nevada because of the stories he tells whoever stops to listen, and the places in them go Budapest, Berlin, Granada, Beijing, Madrid. The song does not settle whether any of it happened. That is the point of it: a biography assembled in front of a stranger willing to sit down.
Metal Hammer Italia hears the American alternative rock of the nineties in it, filtered through the Italian bands who took it on. Coming from a band whose last four records were sludge, that is a long way out from the home key.
Varego have been going since 2009 out of Arenzano, just along from Genoa, with Simon Lepore on drums, Alberto Pozzo on guitars and Davide Marcenaro singing, the same three since the start. Metal Archives still lists them as unsigned, four albums in.