Posted in Whathaveyou on April 30th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
As casual as the arrival of Herba Mate‘s new two-tracker 7″, Boogie Mouse/Sì è Lei, and the accompanying video for its A-side has been, one might almost think it wasn’t the Italian trio’s most substantive outing in a decade. They dropped a single in 2016 as well, but the Faenza-based rockers shared their Early Shapes (review here) split LP with Fatso Jetson in 2014, and, well, that was 10 years ago. Welcome back, Herba Mate.
“Boogie Mouse” brings a willfully choppy garage rock groove and leaves room for the sax at the end, while the organ-laced “Sì è Lei” fuzzes up a 1966 original by Italy’s The Blackmen, reminiscent of its era in its chorus while not diverging from the fullness of its production. As heralds of a new full-length, Bolide, reportedly in the works for later this year, I find both cuts to be a fitting reminder of why they were such an easy band to dig to start with.
It’s probably a no-brainer if you remember their debut, 2009’s The Jellyfish is Dead and the Hurricane is Coming (review here), and something of a re-introduction for the rest, plus righteous, attention-grabbing artwork for the platter and video. So maybe a no-brainer across the board, then. Fair enough.
Full stream from Bandcamp at the bottom, this from the PR wire:
We have released for Record Store Day Italia a 7″ printed in 300 numbered copies (lim.edt.), published by EDIG, a beat label born in 1960, together with Casa Del Disco, a long-time running record store based in Faenza (RA).
The 7″ features 2 songs: the hit single Boogie Mouse which will be included in the upcoming album “Bolide” (planned for autumn/winter) and “Sì è Lei”, a song written by the cult beat band The Blackmen and released in 1966 by Edig.
“Boogie Mouse”, on side A, is an uplifting rock song, “that could have been released by an imaginary band with member of Queens of the Stone Age, Black Keys and Royal Blood.”
“Sì è Lei” (reading “C.L.A”, “Yes, She is”) on side B, is Herba Mate version of a song by the cult band The Blackmen, published by the Italian beat label EDIG in 1966. Here you can get the energy of MC5, feel a psychedelic atmosphere like Tame Impala, reminding of Procol Harum thanks to the keyboards Farfisa and Hammond played by the well-known Nicola Peruch.
The songs were recorded at the studio “L’Amore Mio Non Muore” in Forlì with sound engineer Franco Naddei, and were mastered by Giovanni Versari “La Maestà”.
Posted in Questionnaire on August 26th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
The Obelisk Questionnaire is a series of open questions intended to give the answerer an opportunity to explore these ideas and stories from their life as deeply as they choose. Answers can be short or long, and that reveals something in itself, but the most important factor is honesty.
Based on the Proust Questionnaire, the goal over time is to show a diverse range of perspectives as those who take part bring their own points of view to answering the same questions. To see all The Obelisk Questionnaire posts, click here.
Thank you for reading and thanks to all who participate.
The Obelisk Questionnaire: Alessandro Trerè of Herba Mate
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How do you define what you do and how did you come to do it?
My name is Alessandro Trerè, I am a 45-year-old father of two kids, I’ve been playing for 20 years with my two pals, Andrea and Ermes in the band Herba Mate, I am not a professional musician, I have a full-time job in a MedDev company, but music is my life: I am a record collector, bass collector, solid state amps fanatic, part time consultant in my wife’s record shop in my hometown Faenza…
Herba Mate is a trio who comes from the same musical background: me, Andrea and Ermes are almost the same age and we have lived the golden age of ’90s/’00s international rock music in our teens; even though we are in a geographically and linguistically distant country (Italy) we were fed with bread and US/UK rock music thanks to local small but very well stocked record shops and good TV broadcasts! We started playing grunge covers with zero experience, no cash in our pocket, borrowing crappy instruments…and when stoner rock came up, we got hit by the sound of Kyuss, Monster Magnet, Fatso Jetson, the Heads, Core etc.: in particular, the live performance of Homme & Co. on the Italian TV program “Segnali di Fumo”, back in 1995, was the turning point; watching it in real time, on a national TV program, just after lunch, back from school, was the moment when we understood that a new musical concept was born. So we started to tune down our axes, to crank up the gain on our self-distorted cheap amps, to put aside our pocket money for affording still cheap, but more powerful amps and Herba Mate was born.
No doubt, our music is then strongly inspired by stoner rock / desert rock, it spans from ’70s heavy rock to groovy stoner rock, with a touch of ’60s psych and a bit of Krautrock motoric iterations. It’s the sound coming out from our amps that gives us the fuel for our musical inspiration.
Frankly speaking, what we listen to, now, is distant from the stoner rock we were listening to when we started our journey back in 2000: the three of us have different musical tastes that, in most of the cases, don’t involve heavy distorted guitar sounds! But, when we plug in and switch our amps on, there’s nothing better than a heavy psych jam to take us to our own comfort zone, our own paradise.
Describe your first musical memory.
There was a sort of MTV in Italy, back in the ’80s, and I remember quite clearly the video of “it’s a shame” by Talk Talk… that sound told me something, and nowadays I can’t help but having goosebumps when I hear Mark Hollis’ voice.
Describe your best musical memory to date.
Hard to say, I am not able to isolate just one single, best musical memory. As I love lists, please allow me to write down the following short one:
– When I first touched a bass string on a secondhand Fender Jazz bass
– The first time I saw Kyuss on a TV show (see my answer above)
– The day I listened to the first 15 seconds of track #1 of Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart
– Watching Morphine live in Imola (my first rock concert when I was 14-15 years old)
– Attending Slint performing Spiderland live in Bologna.
– First time I saw Fatso Jetson live at Sidro Club in Savignano, few years ago: that’s the day I met my idol and actual friend Mario Lalli for the first time! Few months later my band Herba Mate supported them live and then we received from Mario a bunch of their unreleased tracks, for our split album Early Shapes… What a man, what a band!
When was a time when a firmly held belief was tested?
When I realized that I could handle health problems, both physical and mental, not relying solely on medical / pharmaceutical prescriptions based on conventional drugs and conventional medical approaches.
Where do you feel artistic progression leads?
Artistic progression leads to peace and harmony, individually and globally. As a human being, the gift of embracing an artistic path is helping me releasing personal tensions and gloom, which results in an open minded, proactive approach towards the outside world; and the more I feed my art “hunger”, the better I face the world and who lives in it. Anyone should let art in.
How do you define success?
Success is when you find the right tuning and the right frequency in everyday life: for instance, when you tune your instrument on the stage or during rehearsals, when the song you play is in-tune, but also when you properly tune your talking to your children, your wife, your working colleagues, your friends…Tuning is a form of empathy you should tend to, and when you find the right balancing and frequency, you are on your way for a daily success.
What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?
The most shocking one has been the accidental viewing of a scene from Deep Red movie (from Dario Argento) on TV, when I was six years old: the reflection of the murderer on a mirror, with a spooky picture on the back wall, is a frame that haunted my dreams for years and has probably had a negative effect on my growth… over time, I got over it and that movie became one of my all-time favorite, but I really think that, those days, this small event helped making me a shy and introvert kid.
Describe something you haven’t created yet that you’d like to create.
I haven’t yet finished to shape myself for becoming the human being I’d like to be; but I am working on it, I still have to refine some roughness. (#128521#)
What do you believe is the most essential function of art?
Art is an essential element: it should be mentioned in Mendeleev’s table somewhere in between Carbon and Oxygen.
Something non-musical that you’re looking forward to?
Posted in Reviews on December 24th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
There isn’t enough caffeine in the universe to properly sustain a Quarterly Review, and yet here we are. I’ve been doing this for six years now, and once started I’ve always managed to get through it. This seven-day spectacular hits its halfway point today, which is okay by me. I decided to do this because there was a bunch of stuff I still wanted to consider for my year-end list, which I’d normally post this week. And sure enough, a few more have managed to make the cut from each day. I’ll hope to put the list together in the coming days and get it all posted next week, before the poll results at least. I’m not sure why that matters, but yeah.
Thanks for following along if you have been. Hope you’ve found something worth digging into.
Quarterly Review #31-40:
Pallbearer, Forgotten Days
Their best record. I don’t want to hear anymore about their demo, or about 2012’s Sorrow and Extinction (review here) or anything else. This is the album Pallbearer have been driving toward since their outset. It is an amalgam of emotive melody and tonal weight that makes epics of both the 12-minute “Silver Wings” and the four-minute “The Quicksand of Existing” that immediately follows, that hits a morose exploration of self in opener “Forgotten Days” and “Stasis” while engaging in metallic storytelling on “Vengeance and Ruination” and “Rite of Passage,” the latter incorporating classic metal melody in perhaps the broadest reach the band has ever had in that regard. So yeah. Pallbearer don’t have a ‘bad’ record. 2017’s Heartless (review here) was a step forward, to be sure. But Forgotten Days, ironically enough, is the kind of offering on which legacies are built and a touchstone for whatever Pallbearer do from here on out.
The fog rolls in thick on Argentinian doomers Fulanno‘s second full-length, Nadie Está a Salvo del Mal. The seven-track/42-minute outing launches in post-Electric Wizard fashion, and indeed, the drawling lumber of the Dorset legends is an influence throughout, but by no means the only one the trio of guitarist/vocalist Fila Frutos, bassist Mauro Carosela and drummer Jose A. are under. They cast a doom-for-doomers vibe almost immediately, but as “Fuego en la Cruz” gives way to “Los Elegidos” and “Hombre Muerto,” the sense of going deeper is palpable. Crunching, raw tonality comes across as the clean vocals cut through, and the abiding rawness becomes a part of the aesthetic on “Los Colmillos de Satan,” a turning point ahead of the interlude “Señores de la Necrópolis,” the eight-minute “El Desierto de los Caídos” and the surprisingly resonant closing instrumental “El Libro de los Muertos.” Fulanno are plenty atmospheric when they want to be, and one wonders if that won’t come further forward as their progression continues. Either way, they’ve staked their claim in doom and sound ready to die for the cause.
Preceded by a series of singles over the last couple years, Cadets is the full-length debut from Los Angeles four-piece Spirit Mother, and it packs expanse into deceptively efficient songs, seeming to loll this way and that even as it keeps an underlying forward push. The near-shoegaze vocals do a lot of the work in affecting a mellow-psych vibe, but there’s weight to Spirit Mother‘s “Ether” as well, violin, woven vocal layers, and periodic tempo kicks making songs standout from each other even as “Go Getter” keeps an experimentalist feel and “Premonitions” aces its cosmic-garage driver’s test with absolutely perfect pacing. The ultra-spacey “Shape Shifter I” and more boogie-fied “Shape Shifter II” are clear focal points, but Cadets as a whole is a marked accomplishment, particularly for a first LP, and in style, substance and atmosphere, it brings together rich textures with a laissez-faire spontaneity. The closing instrumental “Bajorek” is only one example among the 10 included tracks of Spirit Mother‘s potential, which is writ large throughout.
UK four-piece Gévaudan made their debut in 2019 with Iter, and though I’m late to the party as ever, the five-song/53-minute offering is of marked scope and dynamic. Its soft stretches are barely there, melancholic and searching, and its surges of volume in opener “Dawntreader” are expressive without being overwrought. Not without modern influence from Pallbearer or YOB, etc., Gévaudan‘s honing in on atmospherics helps stand out Iter as the band plod-marches with “The Great Heathen Army” — the most active of inclusions and the centerpiece — en route to “Saints of Blood” (11:54) and closer “Duskwalker” (15:16), the patient dip into extremity of the latter sealing the record’s triumph; those screams feel not like a trick the band kept up their collective sleeve, but a transition earned through the grueling plunge of all the material prior. It’s one for which I’d much rather be late than never.
The burly heavy rock of “South” at the outset of Italian heavy rockers El Rojo‘s El Diablo Rojo doesn’t quite tell the whole tale of the band’s style, but it gives essential clues to their songwriting and abiding burl. Later pieces like the slower-rolling “Ascension” (initially, anyhow) and acoustic-inclusive “Cactus Bloom” effectively build on the foundation of bruiser riffs and vocals, branching out desert-influenced melody and spaciousness instrumentalism even as the not-at-all-slowed-down “When I Slow Down” keeps affairs grounded in their purpose and structure. Riffs are thick and lead the charge on the more straightforward pieces and the seven-minute “Colors” alike as El Rojo attempt not to reinvent heavy or stoner rocks but to find room for themselves within the established tenets of genre. They’ve been around a few years at this point, and there’s still growing to be done, but El Diablo Rojo sounds like the starting point of an engaging progression.
Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Jethro Tull, some Led Zeppelin in “Crazy Little Lover” and a touch of opera on “Nasrid” for good measure, Witchwood‘s 62-minute Before the Winter 2LP may be well on the other side of unmanageable in terms of length, but at least it’s not wasting anyone’s time. Instead, early rockers like “Anthem for a Child” and “A Taste of Winter” and the wah-funked “Feelin'” introduce the elements that will serve as the band’s colorful palette across the whole of the album. And a piece like “No Reason to Cry” becomes a straight-ahead complement to airier material like the not-coincidentally-named “A Crimson Moon” and the winding and woodsy “Hesperus,” which caps the first LP as the 10-minute epic “Slow Colours of Shade” does likewise for the record as a whole, followed by a bonus Marc Bolan cover on the vinyl edition, to really hammer home the band’s love of the heavy ’70s, which is already readily on display in their originals.
If nothing else, Gary Lee Conner sounds like he probably has an enviable collection of 45s. The delightfully weird former Screaming Trees guitarist offers up 10 fresh delights of ’60s-style garage-psych solo works on the follow-up to 2018’s Unicorn Curry, as Revelations in Fuzz lives up to its title in tone even as cascades of organ and electric piano, sitar and acoustic guitar weave in and out of the proceedings. How no one has paired Conner with Baby Woodrose frontman Uffe Lorenzen for a collaboration is a mystery I can’t hope to solve, but in the swirling and stops of “Cheshire Cat Claws” and the descent of six-minute closer “Colonel Tangerine’s Sapphire Sunshine Dreams,” Conner reaffirms his love of that which is hypnotic and lysergic while hewing to a traditionalism of songwriting that makes cuts like “Vicious and Pretty” as catchy as they are far out. And trust me, they’re plenty far out. Conner is a master of acid rock, pure and simple. And he’s already got a follow-up to this one released, so there.
Formed in Italy with Albanian roots, Tomorr position themselves as rural doom, which to an American reader will sound like ‘country,’ but that’s not what’s happening here. Instead, three-piece are attempting to capture a raw, village-minded sound, with purposeful homage to the places outside the cities of Europe made into sludge riffing and the significant, angular lumber of “Grazing Land.” I’m not sure it works all the time — the riff in the second half of “Varr” calls to mind “Dopesmoker” more than anti-urbane sensibilities, and wants nothing for crush — but as it’s their debut, Tomorr deserve credit for approaching doom from an individualized mindset, and the bulk of the six-song/48-minute offering does boast a sound that is on the way to being the band’s own, if not already there. There’s room for incorporating folk progressions and instrumentation if Tomorr want to go that route, but something about the raw approach they have on their self-titled is satisfying on its own level — a meeting of impulses creative and destructive at some lost dirt crossroads.
Well what the hell do you think Temple of the Fuzz Witch sounds like? They’re heavy as shit. Of course they are. The Detroiters heralded doomly procession on their 2019 self-titled demo/EP (review here), and the subsequent debut full-length Red Tide, is righteously plodding riffery, Sabbathian without just being the riff to “Electric Funeral” and oblivion-bound nod that’s so filled with smoke it’s practically coughing. What goes on behind the doors of the Temple? Volume, kid. Give me the chug of “The Others” any and every day of the week, I don’t give a fuck if Temple of the Fuzz Witch are reinventing the wheel or not. All I wanna do is put on “Ungoliant” and nod out to the riff that sounds like “The Chosen Few” and be left in peace. Fuck you man. I ain’t bothering anyone. You’re the one with the problem, not me. This guy knows what I’m talking about. Side B of this record will eat your fucking soul, but only after side A has tenderized the meat. Hyperbole? Fuck you.
Rife with adventurous and Middle Eastern-inflected heavy psychedelia, Nowhere Land is the follow-up to Toulouse, France-based Karkara‘s 2019 debut, Crystal Gazer (review here), and it finds the three-piece pushing accordingly into broader spaces of guitar-led freakery. Would you imagine a song called “Space Caravan” has an open vibe? You’d be correct. Same goes for “People of Nowhere Land,” which even unto its drum beat feels like some kind of folk dance turned fuzz-drenched lysergic excursion. The closing pair of “Cards” and “Witch” feel purposefully teamed up to round out the 36-minute outing, but maybe that’s just the overarching ethereal nature of the release as a whole coming through as Karkara manage to transport their listener from this place to somewhere far more liquid, languid, and encompassing, full of winding motion in “Falling Gods” and graceful post-grunge drift in “Setting Sun.”
