They might lead off with the creepy and cold impression of “Winter,” but by the end of their How I Reached Home debut LP, Milano four-piece My Home on Trees owe much more to warmth than freeze. In particular, to warmth of tone. The Italian outfit effectively blur the line between heavy rock, psychedelia and doom, leaning toward faster, post-Kyuss desert push on side B’s “Arrow” before sliding fluidly into the slower, trippier “Resume.” As their first release for Italian imprint Heavy Psych Sounds, it finds My Home on Trees — the lineup of vocalist Laura Mancini, guitarist Marco Bertucci, bassist Giovanni Mastrapasqua and drummer Marcello Modica — carving an identity for themselves of largely familiar genre elements, but hardly wearing out their welcome across the record’s seven tracks/36 vinyl-primed minutes.

It’s worth noting that the first half of the album rounds out with two minutes from Orson Welles‘ War of the Worlds, seemingly as a complement to the sample at the beginning of “Winter” from the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road wherein a boy asks his father how many people he thinks are still alive and the answer comes back, “In the world? Not very many.” How or if this is actually intended to tie the songs together — the “Winter” in question could just as easily be nuclear, I guess — I couldn’t say, but they start at a rush after that sample and seem aware enough of the expectation of their audience to throw an immediate curve in by slowing “Winter” circa its midpoint and adding a growling, semi-spoken guest appearance from The Midnight Ghost Train‘s Steve Moss, who adds a lurker atmosphere to the track that immediately widens the context for the rest of the material that follows.

The effect is that How I Reached Home throws you for a loop before it’s hardly begun, and it’s a crucial effect when it comes to listening to the rest of the album, because as “I Forgot Everything” stomps its way through its intro to make way for the first verse topped by Mancini‘s bluesy vocals, one doesn’t necessarily know what’s coming next. As to the answer — it’s a barrage of big, hairy riffery and choice groove, the songs maintaining catchy vibes and rough-edged psychedelic flourish of effects and subtle melodic intricacy delivered at varying speed. Starting out with a sparse bassline and ethereal, far-back vocal, “Don’t Panic” teases otherworldliness but winds up steeped in Vista Chino-esque fuzz, playing out at a comfortable middling pace for the first half before shifting into a slowdown that only enhances the nod later on, Bertucci and Mastrapasqua constructing a wall of fuzz that they proceed to tear down once the shuffling chorus returns, setting up the last fadeout into “War of the Worlds.”

And once again, that seems to be drawn right from the 1938 Orson Welles broadcast. I’m not sure if that’s in the public domain or what (if it is, it’s a treasure), but its inclusion on How I Reached Home is somewhat curious both in the context of the The Road sample earlier and the album in general, leaving one to wonder what exactly the apocalypse at hand might be and if “Don’t Panic” is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-style advice on how to deal with it. If the record has a front-to-back narrative — it certainly has a front-to-back flow, but that’s different — I don’t know about it, but there’s a thematic leaning in the first half that, in light of the opener, seems to delight in the confusion it’s creating. I, for one, enjoy that.

With “War of the Worlds” rounding out side A, it’s up to the three cuts on side B — “Arrow,” “Resume” and “My Home on Trees” — to further expand the album’s scope. As noted, “Arrow” is the most purely Kyussian of the inclusions here, a heads-down “Green Machine”-winking riff that makes the most of Mastrapasqua‘s bass tone and finds Mancini doing a decent John Garcia from deep in that swell of fuzz, Modica‘s snare cutting through to punctuate the rush. It’s also the shortest song on How I Reached Home (“War of the Worlds” aside), but not by much at 4:52, and one might account for the difference in pacing alone. The more active feel suits the band well and feeds smoothly into the laid-back opening of “Resume,” which picks up with harmonica, bigger riffing and a sustained shout before the wave recedes into more open, patient roll. If that’s My Home on Trees weirding out, then I’m all in favor.

Being their debut — following a self-titled demo in 2013 — it’s encouraging to find them so ready to break the rules they’ve established, and the eponymous “My Home on Trees” continues the thread, effectively summarizing across a near-eight-minute span what’s come before it in trading thrust for nod and tossing in some airy spaciousness in Bertucci‘s post-midsection lead while also toying with a more linear instrumental structure behind Mancini‘s verses. They end big and groove, which feels about right, and the last remaining element to fadeout is the fuzzed guitar — only too fitting since that’s been what has led the way through so much of the material. That’s not to take anything away from the prowess of the rhythm section or the potential vocal powerhouse up front. Rather, these aspects combine with that underlying drive toward the bizarre to make How I Reached Home a satisfying first album that establishes firm ground under the band’s feet and shows them as quick to depart from there to more individual territory.

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Tags: Heavy Psych Sounds, How I Reached Home, Italy, Milan, My Home on Trees, My Home on Trees How I Reached Home

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015 at 10:15 am and is filed under audiObelisk, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.