Album Review: Black Rainbows, Cosmic Ritual Supertrip
This is a band who know what works. Some 13 years on from their debut album, Twilight in the Desert, and working as a flagship act for frontman Gabriele Fiori‘s Heavy Psych Sounds label as well as spearheads of Italy’s jam-packed underground, Roman trio Black Rainbows have every sense of who they are as a unit and where they want to be in terms of their sound. And even as Fiori has split his focus with the label, a festival series of the same name, and with other projects like Killer Boogie and The Pilgrim, the mission of Black Rainbows has remained consistent: To embody the sound of riding a motorcycle made of fuzz riffs through space on a desert interstate to hell.
Cosmic Ritual Supertrip is the seventh or eighth Black Rainbows full-length depending on how you count, and like 2018’s Pandaemonium (review here), it was recorded with Fabio Sforza. Tracked over a period of three days at Forward Studios in Rome, it finds Fiori as the lone remaining original member of the band joined by the rhythm section of returning drummer Filippo Ragazzoni and newcomer bassist Edoardo “Mancio” Mancini, who steps in for Giuseppe Guglielmino. The shifts in lineup around Fiori aren’t necessarily anything new for Black Rainbows, and as noted, who’s where around him ultimately factors little into the band’s purpose. That’s not to take away from anyone else’s personality or playing style — there are certainly changes in the band’s dynamic that have emerged over time as well as an evolution of songwriting that hits its high water mark here — but there’s little question whose band Black Rainbows is.
Past efforts from Black Rainbows have pounded away through space rock, psychedelia, classic stoner idolatry — Nebula have always been a crucial influence — and jammy freakouts, and Cosmic Ritual Supertrip brings a mix of all of the above, but mostly what comes through the 12-track/49-minute long-player (the vinyl leaves off two songs) is the underlying strength of craft. Fiori, Ragazzoni and Mancini weave and wind their way through these varying styles and elements, working at a range of tempos within and between songs, but whether it’s the scorching layered soloing at the apex of “Hypnotized by the Solenoid” or the pure stoner-is-as-stoner-does-ism of the earlier “Radio 666,” there is a distinct energy and vitality to the work that is singularly Black Rainbows‘ own.
The album practically starts at a sprint with “At Midnight You Cry” and even a subdued moment like the two-minute drifter “The Great Design” is followed up by “Master Rocket Power Blast,” which — if it even needs to be said — hits like it’s been huffing paint thinner for three weeks straight and decided now was a good time to try skydiving. What’s come to the fore over time in Black Rainbows‘ let-it-fly-off-the-rails approach, however, is just how much it actually doesn’t fly off those rails. It was true to an extent on Pandaemonium and 2016’s Stellar Prophecy (review here) and 2015’s Hawkdope (review here) as well, but never more than it is now, that there is a plan being followed in the material. The title Cosmic Ritual Supertrip sounds like pure druggy nonsense, but that’s the idea too. The record, the band, and the songs — they’re all supposed to be the vehicle of the pure, out-of-your-mind escapism that is relishing volume, weight, and presence in heavy music. The medium is the message.
Where Black Rainbows bring a shift in approach into play is the focus on songs. Cosmic Ritual Supertrip flows suitably as a full-length release — the vinyl edition drops the last two tracks of the CD, “Searching for Satellites I & II” and “Fire Breather,” bringing the runtime to about 40 minutes even — but it’s the manner on which individual tracks stand out that would seem to distinguish this latest work from its recent predecessors. A normally hard-touring unit, Black Rainbows are no strangers to engaging an audience, and whether it’s the initial salvo of “At Midnight You Cry,” the desert-rolling “Universal Phase,” “Radio 666” and the hotshot swing of “Isolation” ahead of “Hypnotized by the Solenoid,” or later pieces like the lead-and-crash-soaked “Snowball,” “Glittereyzed” with its mashed-together space and gallop impulses, or the almost chunky-style turns of “Sacred Graal” — Deliverance-era C.O.C. come to mind — there’s a sense that even when Cosmic Ritual Supertrip is at its most sonically sprawling, the songs aren’t wasting a second of their time or yours.
I don’t know if it’s right to call it urgency, though it can be intense at times and Black Rainbows have bordered on speed-rocking mania in the past, but these songs maintain the electric current so key to the band’s collective persona even as they feel particularly hammered out and worked through. They’re not overthought, but it’s as though Fiori and company went into the process of making Cosmic Ritual Supertrip with the goal of having the individual tracks each do as much work as possible. And they do, from front to back. Be it the sharp turns from “Hypnotized by the Solenoid” into “The Great Design” into “Master Rocket Power Blast” or the Monster Magnet-y keys and effects laced throughout “Searching for Satellites I & II” or the samples from 1957’s The Giant Claw about seeing a giant bird as a harbinger of death in “Fire Breather” as the band conjure one last rush, each piece finds a way to leave an impression, and because of that, the album as a whole does as well.
It’s not a case where Black Rainbows have undergone a radical shift in approach. Their sound will be easily recognizable for anyone who took on Pandaemonium, etc., but Cosmic Ritual Supertrip proves their mastery of their approach on a new level by seeing them use songwriting in a different way. They’ve released collections of songs before, and they’ve released albums that have cohered like single long-form works as well, but never quite with as much purpose behind doing so as Cosmic Ritual Supertrip has in how it gives each inclusion its moment in the spotlight. As Black Rainbows continue through this stage of their maturity — and 13 years and seven or eight records on, “maturity” seems like a fair word — that they’re still working in different modes of expression as a unit, and seeming to control it more than ever before, could hardly be more encouraging. The possibilities become endless.
Black Rainbows, Cosmic Ritual Supertrip (2020)
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