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“Stella,” is Uzeda’s first album in eight years, feels like the product of great effort. This isn’t to suggest that it’s overly polished; Steve Albini’s analog recording techniques magnify the songs’ abrupt transitions, the guitars’ coarse textures, the rhythm section’s unstable but decisively brutal drive, and singer Giovanna Cacciola’s anxiety-tinged croons and cries. The 20-year-old Sicilian quartet has surpassed its intense but not terribly original earlier efforts to crystallize all its strengths on this bracing set.
