Six Dumb Questions with Killer Boogie (Plus Full Album Stream)
Posted in audiObelisk, Six Dumb Questions on March 7th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
As I’m sure someone much wiser than myself once said, sometimes you got the boogie in you, you gotta let that boogie out. Such would seem to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe-esque origin story of Roman classic-style heavy rockers Killer Boogie, whose 2015 debut, Detroit (review here), and subsequent participation in a four-way split with The Golden Grass, Wild Eyes and Banquet (review here) has still left them with plenty of dancing demons to exorcise — or at least put to tape, depending on how you want to look at it. The band’s second long-player, Acid Cream, is an 11-track swirl-and-fuzz-o-thon that takes the heavy ’70s crotchal thrust of the first record and pushes it cosmic; an upward trajectory of caked-on reverb and vibe, vibe, vibe that makes songs like “Escape from Reality” and “Atomic Race” as tripped out as they are clued in.
That spacebound progression is a marked difference between Detroit and Acid Cream, and while no rule is absolute — “Am I Daemon” certainly has its earthbound shuffling aspects — the shift could hardly come at a more interesting time. Killer Boogie is comprised of drummer Luigi Costanzo, newcomer bassist Nicola Cosentino and 
guitarist/vocalist Gabriele Fiori, the latter also the founder of Italian heavy psych forerunners Black Rainbows and the head of Heavy Psych Sounds Records and Booking, whose work promoting the Italian underground and really the wider sphere of boogie rock and heavy psych over the last five years is near-unparalleled. As Fiori brings Black Rainbows down to a more grounded approach with their new album, it somehow makes sense that some of those spacier impulses would show up in Killer Boogie, but there’s still plenty of proto-punk to be had in “Let the Birds Fly,” the odd interlude “Mississippi,” the Sabbath-chugging “The Black Widow” and even the grunge-laced penultimate cut, “The Day of the Melted Ice Cream,” which gives way to the testosterone space-drift of “I Wanna Woman Like You” to close out.
The fact that Killer Boogie have worked at a pretty quick clip isn’t such a surprise — between signing bands to his label, booking tours for himself and others, writing, recording and playing live, Fiori doesn’t seem much the type for stillness — but it’s the fact of the stylistic movement leading to Acid Cream, as well as the integration of Cosentino on bass, that most intrigues when it comes to the band’s second album, where it’s taking them sound-wise and how they might continue to push forward and perhaps outward from here. Do they have interplanetary boogie? Does it exist? We may get there yet.
Acid Cream is out this week on Heavy Psych Sounds. You can stream the album in full on the player below and check out a Q&A with Fiori about making the record after having done Detroit, changes in the band and much more.
Please enjoy the following Six Dumb Questions and full album stream:
Six Dumb Questions with Killer Boogie
—
Tell me about writing for Acid Cream? When did you start and what did you want to do differently coming off of Detroit?
Writing for Acid Cream, we had Nicola as a new bass player and we definitely wanted to go to the rehearsal space to have some fun and immediately after the first rehearsal we wrote three or four songs and we had a lot of new material, music, without shape. Rough songs, plus a couple of new songs already written down with our old bass player. So right in the summer last year, we had the drummer, Luigi, he had to go to work in Russia for one year, so we had to record all the songs in the summer or probably the second album of Killer Boogie would never see the light. So we’ve been a long time in the rehearsal, shaping all the songs, writing down the lyrics and stuff, and we just booked in full August, which is pretty calm around here because everything is stopping for the summer break, and we found a nice studio and we recorded pretty fast. In two days. There were a lot of songs. Different from Detroit? Well, Detroit was, I don’t know, maybe more spontaneous? I can’t really say, but also this record is spontaneous. Detroit was the first image of the band, and this is maybe a bit different but not so much. Detroit is very fresh, I can say. This one, to us, pretty nice songs, and we did update the sound of the band. The songwriting is a bit different, but not so much.
Obviously the influences are different, but is your writing process any different between Black Rainbows and Killer Boogie? Do you have preferred way of writing and putting together song ideas? How do tracks like “Atomic Race” and “The Black Widow” come about?
The writing process, maybe yes, with Killer Boogie, there is more improvising. It’s not really jam, because maybe I pop up with a killer riff and say, “let’s play this riff together,” and after that, maybe the process is more in the rehearsal space. Yeah, we jam and we try to write a song at the same time we just pop it up, I just pop it up with a riff. And yes, when we go in the rehearsal space with the Boogie there is definitely no rush, no push. We just go there to have fun. Of course there is always the strength of writing a song, so you need to spend time if you want to make a song with a start and an ending, so we definitely work on the songs, but the first approach is definitely more relaxed, and this less psychedelic, so maybe it’s more, “rock and roll, yeah, let’s do it!” “Atomic Race” and “The Black Widow,” I can say that in Black Rainbows and Killer Boogie, maybe all the songs sound killer, but when we record the voice on it, it doesn’t sound so good, and some other songs, like “Atomic Race,” you say, “Oh yeah, this is like a B-side song; I don’t think this would be so good,” and then you record the lyrics, you pop up with cool vocal melodies, and definitely the song takes another shape. So you never know until the end. Maybe you put some keyboard on it and the song definitely changes, so you never know about it. “Atomic Race” and “The Black Widow” comes out like the other ones, but maybe “The Black Widow” is one of the songs we wrote all together with Nicola, the new bass player, and we recorded it in a while.
Tell me about writing “Mississippi.” Have you ever been to the state? What does the song say about the place and its history?
Mississippi, no. I’ve never been to the state. The song doesn’t even have lyrics and vocals, so it’s just a tribute to the land of the blues. So it’s kind of a blues song. Short one. I think Nicola or Luigi gave the name of the song, because it was kind of a blues song. It was a song we just started to play. This is not some kind of riff that comes out. I just started digging with the guitar and everybody was starting playing, and we just had this interlude, short one, was nice. Maybe the recording is less spontaneous than when we recorded during the rehearsal, but it’s nice. I think it’s a nice song.
What was your time in the studio like for Acid Cream? How long did the recording process take, how was the album put together and what was the vibe like while you were working on it?
As I said before about the story of the recording, was pretty fast. We’re pretty fast in recording. If you’re a decent musician, you need to do a lot of rehearsal and of course if you’re not looking for the best of the sound, and if your ideas are really clear, you just go there and record. So we just built the studio in one day, made the sounds which we liked most, and we recorded I think from 9AM to 2PM, playing the tracklist like three or four times. That’s it. Then we chose the best takes. Mixing was a bit of a pain in the ass, because the guy from the studio, he has this fucking old studio where he has tape recorders we didn’t use, but he was working with software, so fucking old and freaky to use, which we lost a lot of time and we have a lot of bugs during the mixing, but in the end, we were pretty satisfied. It’s rough now.
Name the five best albums released in 1971.
Five best albums released in ’71. Well… Black Sabbath one. I had to see, I can’t recall any right now, all the ’71 records. I can definitely mistake. Caravan, In the Land of the Gray and Pink. Of course Master of Reality, which was the only one I remembered, and there’s Led Zeppelin IV, but I’m not crazy about Zeppelin IV, and yeah. And there is Sticky Fingers from Rolling Stones. I would say this one.
Any plans or closing words you want to mention?
We don’t have really plans because the drummer is in Russia and I’m pretty busy with the label and Black Rainbows. So for now, this exact moment, we just wanted to release the album and we will come back with some live shows soon but not so close. Probably the end of the year or next year we will try to arrange some kind of tour definitely. We want to go to Germany. We definitely know we have some audience there who want to see us live after we played Desertfest last year.
Killer Boogie on Thee Facebooks
Heavy Psych Sounds on Thee Facebooks
