Zamarro: Dirty Power, Clean Burning
After recording 2004’s Lust in Translation and 2006’s The Beast is on Your Track (both on Supermodern Records) in Seattle with Jack Endino (who’s done albums for Nebula, Mudhoney, The Atomic Bitchwax, etc.), Swiss power trio Zamarro opted to stay closer to their Basel home near their country’s borders with Germany and France and work with V.O. Pulver (Gurd) in his Little Creek Studios for their first album in three years. The resulting Dirty Power (LC Records) may share a name with a San Francisco stoner band who coincidentally also worked with Endino — unless it’s an unlikely tribute; would be something if Dirty Power‘s next album was called Zamarro — but the record itself offers straightforward, by the books stoner rock.
I’m a firm believer that you can learn a lot about a band with cursory/superficial examination if you do it in the right context. Example: there are 12 tracks on Dirty Power, and eight of them are between 3:02 and 3:49 in length (the others are 4:24, 4:16, 2:25 and 2:38). Without listening, that can mean anything, but once you hear the album and look at the structure of it, it becomes abundantly clear Zamarro are working with a strict songwriting formula from which they rarely deviate. Tracks can have different sounds — and they do — but they still follow the same process.
That process leads to interpreting classic pop verse-chorus-verse constructions with a veneer of muscular, ’70s-inclined upbeat, accessible and occasionally extremely catchy guitar rock. It’s not all girl-as-car/car-as-girl simplicity lyric-wise, as even the titles “Satan’s Arms,” “Alaska” and “Lady from the Sun” demonstrate, but Zamarro have drawn a line and dare not cross it. Like anything, and indeed like most albums, this has upsides and downsides.
As a songwriting team, guitarist/vocalist Markus Gisin, bassist Marco Redolfi and drummer Michael Hediger are undeniably cohesive, and the strength of their abilities shows itself best on early cut “Wild Dogs” and closer to the end with “The Future,” the latter Dirty Power‘s best track. Vocally, Gisin brings an apolitical Bad Religion-style punk edge to “The High One” and the aforementioned “Alaska,” and presents opener “Burning Hearts” and “Satan’s Arms” with emotion that — probably as the result of a shared grunge influence — sounds remarkably like Keith Caputo‘s singing on the woefully mismarketed Life of Agony comeback album, Broken Valley. Given LOA‘s mostly-regional metro NYC popularity, direct inspiration from Caputo to Gisin isn’t likely, but it’s not impossible.
As a rhythm section, Redolfi and Hediger have the nearly-redundant task of keeping this already incredibly grounded album grounded, but they nonetheless perform with character and enthusiasm and help drive home Dirty Power‘s rigidity even on the somewhat forgettable “Down There,” the starts and stops of which would probably be considered filler in a lot of reviews. I don’t see it that way, however; it’s just one more example of what the trio has been doing the whole time. There’s a lot of that going on.
It’s not necessarily a drawback to do one thing and do it well, but at the same time, it has to be recognized for being only one thing. Zamarro have their approach down, there’s no question, but whether that approach is enough to carry Dirty Power across effectively for the span of its 12 tracks is up to the listener involved.
