I started 2023 with a Fire Man album, and I begin 2024 with another Fire Man album. If this doesn’t make a start of a new tradition, it sure looks like it. And I have to admit: there’s no better way to enter a new year than with music like this. After two weeks of colorful lights, hyper-caloric sweets, fake feelings with a high sucrose content and resolutions we’ll forget by carnival, what’s better than a spoonful of old, good, healthy hard rock that spits the stench of harsh reality in your face? Territorial Conquest 2024 is Matrix red pill, its six tracks the deep darkness of the white rabbit hole, Fire Man, aka Caio Brentan, the Jiminy Cricket who brings us back to reality with an EP that talks about war, the only lowest common denominator of the civilization that we insist on calling human. The title track is a warning against the manipulation of information and our good will to anesthetize our ability to be outraged, the closing track, ‘World Peace, Eventually,’ is a reflection on how first-world problems nowadays are more idle matters of semantic conflicts than the resolution of real conflicts (‘We live in fear of words, we choose a death cult made of words and suffocate the peace’).
In the midst of all, pure incendiary hard rock: ‘Great Power Conflict (I am a Spy)’ — introduced by an excerpt from the folk song ‘John Brown’s Body’ — couldn’t be more current, with two wars ongoing at the foot of Europe. ‘Reign of Terror’ perhaps gives the reading key to the entire EP (‘You’re in denial/Manipulation/This is Extortion/This is Real’), and ‘Hamburger Hill’ builds a temporal bridge with the late ’60s Vietnam War. It’s noise-rock, and it’s hardcore punk, still throughout the EP it seems to hear mid-to late ‘80s Megadeth transforming hardcore into metal, with the same vintage and violent riffs, the same high and sharp voice, the same urgence and blasts of power, and if Dave Mustaine wondered ‘Peace Sells… but who’s buying?,’ Caio/Fire Man answers with a thread of hope: ‘World peace is coming next… someday.'”