After recording 2004’s Lust in Translation and 2006’s The Beast is on Your Track (both on Supermodern Records) in Seattle with Jack Endino (who’s done albums for Nebula, Mudhoney, The Atomic Bitchwax, etc.), Swiss power trio Zamarro opted to stay closer to their Basel home near their country’s borders with Germany and France and work with V.O. Pulver (Gurd) in his Little Creek Studios for their first album in three years. The resulting Dirty Power (LC Records) may share a name with a San Francisco stoner band who coincidentally also worked with Endino — unless it’s an unlikely tribute; would be something if Dirty Power‘s next album was called Zamarro — but the record itself offers straightforward, by the books stoner rock.

I’m a firm believer that you can learn a lot about a band with cursory/superficial examination if you do it in the right context. Example: there are 12 tracks on Dirty Power, and eight of them are between 3:02 and 3:49 in length (the others are 4:24, 4:16, 2:25 and 2:38). Without listening, that can mean anything, but once you hear the album and look at the structure of it, it becomes abundantly clear Zamarro are working with a strict songwriting formula from which they rarely deviate. Tracks can have different sounds — and they do — but they still follow the same process.

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