It’s worth noting immediately that no one in the band 3 Mexicans From Gorma is actually Mexican. They’re Italian. The band hails from Verona and its three members – Luigi Calzavara on vocals/guitar, Marco Dal Molin on bass and Igor Lanaro on drums – make their debut on G.O.R.M.A. (Go Down Records), a narrative concept album that tells the story of a cowboy who wanders into a ghost town and gets trapped there by demons and forced to stay for eternity, and in case you’re wondering about style, as it says on the back panel of the jewel case artwork, “3 Mexicans From Gorma plays ONLY FUCKING hard Mexicans stoner music.” So right away, we know they are definitely not not fucking.

G.O.R.M.A. – the name of the town in the plot said to be derived from the band members’ names (I can see it with Lanaro and Dal Molin, though I don’t know how you account for Calzavara in that) – has several sketch interludes, complete with windy backdrop, heavily-accented speech and old-time radio sound effects of horse hooves and opening and closing doors. There’s one in the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end, and between them, the trio riff rocks their way through songs mostly derivative of the desert/stoner mainstays without adding too much to the mix in terms of their own individuality. As I listen though, I almost wish both the sketches and the lyrics to the songs – we open with “Preface/Back to the Desert…” before “Intro” and “Intermission” take hold, so yes, it’s a while before the album gets going – were in Italian, and that there was more of a Western feel in the music. 3 Mexicans From Gorma touches on that, but with Italy’s rich history in the film genre of the Western – not to mention the accompanying music and incredibly influential work of Ennio Morricone – it feels like there’s an opportunity that Calzavara, Dal Molin and Lanaro are letting slip through their collective fingers. Our hero meets a mariachi later into the album, a two-and-a-half-minute acoustic interlude ensues that sets up the Kyuss-esque instrumental “Wah Wah,” and there was another acoustic interlude earlier in the form of “First Day, Jen… When I See You…” but that hardly feels like it’s all 3 Mexicans From Gorma could have done to play with the aesthetic they’ve taken on, and with all the interludes, sketches, intros and outros, there’s never really a flow established on G.O.R.M.A. from one song to the next.

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