Posted in Whathaveyou on July 16th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Punk-rooted Italian heavy rockers Fvzz Popvli are set to head out again in Europe this Fall as they continue to support Feb. 2025’s Melting Pop (review here). This is ‘Part III’ of the tour. Part I was in March. Part II was in May.
Part III being in November after a couple Heavy Psych Sounds Fest appearances in Germany and the UK gives the band a bit of a respite before they head out, and the bulk of the shows coming after October puts them beyond the Fall fest season, which more and more bands seem to be doing this year in Europe, or at least I’m noticing it more. In any case, Fvzz Popvli will enter the field on Nov. 13, as you can see on the list of dates below, as taken from the PR wire. Note the Italian date for the 30th is TBA. I don’t know if that’s a fest or an open slot or what, but if you can give the band someplace to play/sleep, you could certainly do worse than to reach out.
Album stream’s at the bottom. Have at it:
*** FVZZ POPVLI – Melting Tour 2025 – part III***
– the Italian fvzz riffers will be back on tour soon –
Today we are stoked to announce that our Italian fvzz rock riffers FVZZ POPVLI will be back on the road this Fall !!!
*** FVZZ POPVLI – Melting Tour 2025 – part III *** 30.08.2025 – B – BILZEN – INFERNUM FEST 24.10.2025 – D – BERLIN – HPS FEST 25.10.2025 – D – DRESDEN – HPS FEST 31.10.2025 – UK – LONDON – HPS FEST 13.11.2025 – I – TURIN – BLAH BLAH 14.11.2025 -F – TOULON – LA BIÈRE DE LA RADE 15.11.2025 – F – NICE – LA ZOMNÈ 16.11.2025 – F – BARBERAZ – BRIN DE ZINC 18.11.2025 – CH – GENÈVE – D’URGENCE DISK 19.10.2025 – CH – INS – SCHÜXENHAUS 20.11.2025 – D – TUBINGEN – SHEDHALLE 21.11.2025 – D – BIELEFELD – EXTRA BLUES BAR 22.11.2025 – NL – NIJMEGEN – DE ONDERBROEK 23.11.2025 – NL – AMSTERDAM – LOVE FOR LOUD 25.11.2025 – D – WEIMAR – C.KELLER 26.11.2025 – D – LEIPZIG – BLACK LABEL 27.11.2025 – CZ – PRAGUE – KLUBOVNA 28.11.2025 – CH – ST GALLEN – RUMPELTUM 29.11.2025 – CH – BASEL – QUARTERDECK 30.11.2025 – I – TBA
Founded in Rome by Pootchie and Datio in A.D. MMXVI, the idea was to build a powertrio with a direct and rough way to deliver heavy fuzzy riffs. Their sound melts Black Sabbath-style heavy riffs with the roughest garagepunk bands attitude -like The Stooges-, adding the psychedelia from the 70’s to create their own style!
In November 2024 the band signed a new agreement with Heavy Psych Sounds and released a brand new album called Melting Pop in early 2025.
Fvzz Popvli: Pootchie – Gvitar and Voice Alex – Bass George – Drvms
Posted in Reviews on April 11th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
A friendly reminder that the end of the week is not, in fact, the end of the Quarterly Review, which will continue through Monday and Tuesday. That brings the number of releases covered to 70 total, which feels like plenty, and should hopefully carry us through a busy Spring release season. I’m thinking June for the next QR now but don’t be surprised if that turns into July as we get closer. All I know is I wanna do it before it’s two full weeks again.
As always, I hope you’ve found something that speaks to you in all this 10-per-day nonsense. If not, first, wow, really? Second, it ain’t over yet. Maybe today’s your day. One way to know.
Quarterly Review #41-50:
Dead Meadow, Voyager to Voyager
You may be mellow-vibes, but unless you’re “Not the Season,” Dead Meadow have one up on you forever. While Voyager to Voyager, which is the L.A. band’s eighth or ninth LP depending on what you count, comes with the tragic real-world context of bassist Steve Kille‘s 2024 passing, he does feature on the long-running trio’s first offering through Heavy Psych Sounds, and whether it’s “The Space Between” or the shuffle-stepping “The Unhounded Now” or the pastoral “A Question of Will” and the jangly strum of “Small Acts of Kindness” later on, guitarist/vocalist Jason Simon, Kille and drummer Mark Laughlin celebrate the ultra-languid take on heavy, psychedelic and shoegazing rock that’s made Dead Meadow a household name for weirdos. Not that they’re not prone to a certain wistfulness, but Voyager to Voyager is vibrant rather than mournful, and the title-track is an album flow unto itself in just eight minutes. If you can slow your manic-ass brain long enough to sit and hear it front-to-back, you’re in for a treat.
There is a sense of stepping out as Irish troubadour Seán Mulrooney makes his full-length solo debut with This is My Prayer on Ómós Records. Mulrooney is best known for residing at the core of Tau and the Drones of Praise, and for sure, pieces of This is My Prayer are coming from a similar place, but where there was psychedelic meander for the band, under his own moniker, Mulrooney brings a clarity of tone and presence to lyrics ranging from spiritual seeking to what seems to have been an unceremonious breakup. With character and emotion in his voice and range in his craft, Mulrooney sees a better world on “Ag Múscliaghacht” and posits a new masculinity — totally needed; trainwreck gender — in “Walking With the Wind,” meets indie simplicity with lap steel in “Jaguar Dreams” and, in closer “The Pufferfish,” pens a fun McCartney-style bouncer about tripping sea life. These are slivers of the adventures undertaken in singer-songwriter style as Mulrooney hones this solo identity. Very curious to see where the adventure might take him.
Issued in 2024, Sun Dog is the third MaidaVale long-player, and with it, the Swedish heavy psychedelic rockers showcase six years’ worth of growth from their second album. Melancholic of mood in “Fools” and “Control” and the folkish “Alla Dagar” and “Vultures,” Sun Dog starts uptempo with the Afrobeat-influenced “Faces,” drifts, shreds, then drifts again in “Give Me Your Attention,” dares toward pop in “Daybreak” and fosters a sense of the ironic in “Wide Smile is Fine” and “Pretty Places,” the latter of which, with a keyboardier arrangement, could’ve been the kind of New Wave hit that would still be in your head 40 years later. The nine-songer (10 if you get “Perplexity,” which was previously only on the vinyl) doesn’t dwell in any single space for too long — only “Wide Smile is Fine” and “Vultures” are over four minutes, though others are close — and that lets them balance the downer aspects with forward momentum. MaidaVale are no strangers to that kind of movement, of course, but Sun Dog‘s mature realization of their sound feels so much more vast in range.
Here come Causa Sui with another live album. And I’m not saying the only reason the thankfully-prolific Danish psychedelic treasures, heavyjazz innovators and El Paraiso label honchos are only releasing a complement to 2023’s Loppen 2021 (review here) to rub in the fact that I’ve never been lucky enough to catch them on a stage — any stage — but I am starting to take it personally. Call me sensitive. In any case, despite feeling existentially mocked by their chemistry and the fluidity of “Sorcerer’s Disciple” or the 22-minute “Visions of a New Horizon,” the hour-long set is glorious as one would expect, and though Loppen 2024 is a blip on the way to Causa Sui‘s forthcoming studio album, In Flux, especially when set alongside their previous outing from the same Christiania-based venue, it highlights the variable persona of the band and the reach of their material. Someday I’ll see this goddamn band.
Underlying the grit and stoner drawl of “El Rey del Mundo de los Muertos” is the lurching progression of Black Sabbath‘s “Sweet Leaf,” and that reinterprative ethic comes to the strutting Pentagrammery of “La Verdad es Tu Ataud” as well, but in the tonal density and the way their groove snails its way into your ear canal, the vibe Fulanno bring to Nosotros Somos el Fin del Mundo is in line with stoner doom traditionalism, and the revelry is palbale in the slow nod of the title-track or the horror samples sprinkled throughout or the earlier Electric Wizard-style languidity of “El Nacimiento de la Muerte.” They save an acoustic stretch in reserve to wrap “Desde las Tinieblas,” but if you think that’s going to clean your soul by that point then you haven’t been paying attention. Unrepentantly dark, stoned and laced with devil-, death-and riff-worship, Nosotros Somos el Fin del Mundo further distinguishes Fulanno in an always crowded Argentinian underground, and dooms like a bastard besides.
Because the age we live in permits such a thing and it tells you something about the music, I’m going to cut and paste the credits for Israeli duo Ze Stoner‘s debut EP/demo, Desert Buddhist. Dor Sarussi is credited with “bass guitar, spaceships, vocals,” while Alexander Krivinski handles “didgeridoo, spaceships, drums, and percussion.” How tripped out does a band need to be to have two members credited with “spaceships,” you ask? Quite tripped out indeed. Across the 12:09 “Part I – The Awakness” (sic) and the 11:41 “Part II – The Trip,” and the much-shorter 1:41 finale “Part III – The Enlightenment,” Ze Stoner take the meditative doom of Om or an outfit like Zaum and extrapolate from it a drone-based approach that retains a meditative character. It is extreme in its capacity to induce a trance, and as Desert Buddhist unfolds, it plays as longer movements tied together as a single work. There is massive potential here. One hopes Sarussi, Krivinski, their spaceships and didgeridoo are just beginning their adventures in the cosmos.
Oslo-based newcomers Arv aren’t shy about what their sound is trying to do. Their debut album, Curse & Courage, arrives via the wheelhouse of Vinter Records and brings together noise-laced and at-times-caustic hardcore with the atmospherics, echoing tremolo and churning intensity of post-metal. They lean to one side or the other throughout, and “Wrath” seems to get a bit of everything, but it’s a harder line to draw than one might think because hardcore as a style is all urgency and post-metal very often brings a more patient take. Being able to find a place in songwriting between the two, well, Arv aren’t the first to do it, but they are impressively cohesive for Curse & Courage being their first record, and the likes of “Victim,” the overwhelming rush of “Forsaken” earlier on and the more-ambient-but-still-vocally-harsh closing title-track set up multiple avenues for future evolution of the ideas they present here. Too aggressive to be universal in its appeal, but makes undeniable use of its scathe.
I’m not sure what’s going on in “Erotik Fvel P.I.M.P.,” but there’s chicanery a-plenty throughout Fvzz Popvli‘s fourth full-length, Melting Pop, which is released in renewed cooperation with Heavy Psych Sounds. Hooks, fuzz, and the notion that anything else would be superfluous pervade the Indiana Jones-referencing “Temple of Doom” and “Telephone” at the outset, the latter with some choice backing vocals, and they kick the fuzz into overdrive on “Salty Biscvits” with room besides for a jangly verse. Running an ultra-manageable 30 minutes, the album breaks in half with four songs on each side. “Kommando” leads off the second half with dirtier low end tone ahead of the slower-rolling “Ovija,” which shouts and howls and is all kinds of righteously unruly, where “Cop Sacher” punks at the start and has both gang vocals and a saxophone, which I can say with confidence nothing else among the 70 records in this Quarterly Review even tried let alone pulled off, and they close with due swagger and surprising class in “The Knight.” Part of Fvzz Popvli‘s persona to this point has been based in rawness, so it’s interesting to hear them fleshing out more complex arrangments, but at heart they remain very much stoner rock for the glory of stoner rock.
The tone worship is there, the working-class-dude stoner swing is there, and the humor that might result in a song like “Hypertension” — for which no less than Bob Balch of Fu Manchu sits in — so when I compare Rust Bucket to Maryland’s lost sons Earthride, please know that I’m not talking out of my ass. The Minnesota-based double-guitar five-piece revel in low end buzz-tone, and with no-pretense groove, throaty vocals and big personality, that spirit is there. Doesn’t account for the boogie of “Keep Us Down,” but everybody’s gotta throw down now and then. They shift into a sludgier mood by the time they get around to “The Darkness” and “Watch Your Back,” but the idea behind this first Rust Bucket feels much more like a bunch of guys getting together to hammer out some cool songs, maybe play some shows, do a record and see how it goes. On paper, that makes Rust Bucket an unassuming start, but its anti-bullshit stance, steady roll and addled swing make it a gem of the oldschool variety. Much to their credit, they call the style, “fuzzy caveman dad rock.” They forgot ‘bearded,’ but otherwise that about sums it up. Maybe the beard is implied?
It is appropriate that Mountain Dust named their third LP after themselves, since it finds them transcending their influences and honing a cross-genre approach that’s never sounded more their own than it does in these nine songs. From the densely-weighted misdirect of “Reap” with its Earth-sounding drone riff through the boogieing en route to the mellower and more open soul-showcase “Waiting for Days to End” — backing vocals included, see also “It’s Already Done” on side B — and the organ in “Vengeance,” the dynamic between the Graveyard-style ballad “This is It” and the keyboard/synth-fueled instrumental outro “All Eyes But Two,” Mountain Dust gracefullly subverts retroist expectations with individualized songwriting, performance and production, and this material solidifies the Montreal four-piece among the more flexible acts doing anything in the sphere of 1970s-style heavy rock. That’s still there, understand, but like the genre itself, Mountain Dust have very clearly grown outward from their foundations.
Posted in Whathaveyou on January 6th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
I’m honestly not sure how to classify the upcoming Fvzz Popvli album, whether Melting Pop will be the Roman trio’s first for Heavy Psych Sounds proper or if 2023’s III (review here) was through the label as well as RetroVox or has been reissued or the band just worked with HPS for booking or what. When they signed, there was a sense they were re-signing, that’s all. In any case, they’re on the label now and the record’s coming out.
Imagine heavy garage and proto-punk meeting with loose-groove fuzz, shades of Ramones getting their feet under them, but grown up on Fu Manchu and desert riffing. They’ve never been nor have they ever tried to be perfect — perfect would ruin the songs — but the rawness that’s been part of their collective character to this point comes up against an inevitable awareness of self in the sound. That is, Fvzz Popvli have been around for a bit at this point and, almost in spite of themselves, know what they’re doing. In this case, they’re melting pop.
Also, they’re going on tour.
The dates are in the poster below, and beneath that, I’ve included the album info as well, because I hadn’t had the chance to post it and for my own future reference.
So, from socials and the PR wire, then. A rare collaboration between the two in one post:
Europe!!! fvzzpopvli will be hitting the road in March to celebrate their new LP Melting Pop!!! Be sure to catch them!!!
Say Fvzz Popvli: “Happy new year folks! Let’s start with an awesome announcement: The 1st leg for the MELTING TOUR, the tour will support our upcoming release “MELTING POP” across Europe! We gonna perform in Italy,Switzerland,Germany,Holland,Belgium,Austria and for the very 1st time GREECE!”
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Founded in Rome by Pootchie and Datio in A.D. MMXVI, FVZZ POPVLI is a power trio that delivers heavy fuzzy riffs in a straightforward and no-frills fashion. They play a wild blend of Black Sabbath-style heaviness, a rough garage punk band attitude à la The Stooges, and 70s psychedelia.
The band released their debut EP in May 2017 with a promotional tour in Italy, Switzerland and Germany. In June, they signed to Heavy Psych Sounds for the release of their debut album “Fvzz Dei”, which has brought the band to more than 70 European stages in eight countries including the revered indie festival Duna Jam. In 2018, FVZZ POPVLI released their second album “Magna Fuzz” followed by 75 European shows with appearances at festivals such as HPS Fest, Le Grand Incendie, Berlin Swamp Fest and Tabernas Desert Rock Festival. In 2019, the band signed with indie label Retrovox and released their third studio album “Fvzz Popvli III” in March 2023, supported by four European tours.
FVZZ POPVLI have shared the stage with White Hills, Black Rainbows, Ufomammut, Karma To Burn, Mars Red Sky, Rotor, Naxatras, Lili Refrain, El Perro, Giöbia, Zodiac, DYSE, Powder for Pigeons, Hypnos, The Tazers, Mother Engine, The Midnight Ghost Train and much more.
About their upcoming new album, the band says: “As always, we decided to do our own thing. We’re just so over the same old tired riffs and worn-out stoner vibes, like a pair of Birkenstocks at an indie concert, and let’s not even start on those interesting lyrics about how to smoke weed (seriously, tell us more!). So here we are at a crossroads: should we just follow the crowd and do what everyone else is doing, or put in the hard work to create something that makes us happy while we play it? Well, here’s Melting Pop! It’s not stoner, it’s not garage, it’s not punk, it’s not psych, it’s not even a traditional album. It’s melting, a blend of Fvzz Popvli saying “screw the labels” and just going with the flow, all-natural, like grown-ups with no preservatives.”
