Review, Full Album & Video Premiere: Soldati, Doom Nacional
Posted in audiObelisk, Bootleg Theater, Reviews on April 23rd, 2020 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream Soldati’s Doom Nacional in its entirety. Video premiere for ‘Un Tren al Sol’ is below. Album is out Friday on Argonauta Records.]
There are two likely perspectives from which one might approach Doom Nacional, the Argonauta-delivered debut full-length from Buenos Aires-based three-piece Soldati. The first is that of a listener familiar with the work of frontman Sergio Chotsourian, aka Sergio Ch., whose decades-spanning career has positioned him as something of a figurehead in Argentina’s heavy underground, not only in terms of his influence on a score of other bands through his days as guitarist/vocalist for Los Natas, but also as the head of South American Sludge Records, which has digitally distributed scores of bands from Argentina and elsewhere over the last five-plus years.
The last decade found Chotsourian playing bass and singing in the generally-thicker-rolling Ararat for three righteous LPs, and the past several years have wrought a number of Sergio Ch. solo offerings that play between drone experimentalism and South American folk — the latest, From Skulls Born Beyond (review pending), came out last month — and since their first demo (discussed here) surfaced in 2016, Soldati has been a band that seemed to be piecing together elements of all of the above.
Tracks like “La Electricidad del Arbol Caido” (posted here) and “Whisky Negro” (posted here), both of which feature on Doom Nacional, have been made public before in other forms — indeed, an especially noise-caked take on Doom Nacional closer “Solar Tse” also appears at the end of From Skulls Born Beyond, so these lines between projects are malleable and have been for some time — so those who have followed Chotsourian for a number of years will doubtless approach this first Soldati LP with a different context than those simply taking the band on as a first encounter. As a fan of Chotsourian‘s work in Los Natas, Ararat and across his solo outings, I’ll confess I approached the seven-song/49-minute run of Doom Nacional with some trepidation, not knowing what was coming after such a variety of moods and vibes across the demos and videos and other posted performances, etc.
What a relief it was to finally hear it.
That brings us to the second perspective, of those less engaged with Chotsourian‘s long history of contributions to South America’s underground. This type of listener will find Soldati‘s Doom Nacional to be a coherent, striking collection, variable in tempo and purpose, but united around a groove and charge that is immersive and exciting in kind. Desert rock with a harder edge and sharp craft; Argentinian heavy at its finest. Returning to guitar, Chotsourian brings a signature kind of riffing to stretches of songs like opener “From Skulls” and the speedier sections of “Suicide Girl” and “Los Secretos de Shiva” that, punctuated by Ararat bandmate Alfredo Fellite on drums (a collaboration well worth continuing), plays all the more to a classic Motörhead volatility that comes with desert hues, tying Los Natas and Ararat together even as Soldati — rounded out by bassist Lucas Cassinelli, who makes one of several striking impressions on the penultimate “Un Tren al Sol” — strives to create its own sonic persona.
Soldati, “Un Tren al Sol” official video premiere
With five of the seven inclusions longer than seven minutes long and the other two over five, each song is given time to flesh out as it will and a natural course that includes numerous stops and sudden thrusts, head-down grooves and turns of melody in cuts like “Whisky Negro” and the 8:34 “Solar Tse” that make for highlights unto themselves. As the centerpiece, “La Electricidad del Arbol Caido” summarizes much of what makes Doom Nacional work so well. It is fluid in rhythm and organic in presentation — its tones are by no means raw or wanting viscosity, and will be readily familiar to Los Natas fans but neither are they overproduced — and in its hypnotic nod and post-midpoint shift to speedier fare, it underscores Soldati‘s refusal to be pigeonholed to one approach or the other. Whether a given listener is new to Chotsourian‘s work or not, that kind of thing is easy to appreciate, especially in a first album.
As “Solar Tse” pushes toward its finish, with vocals in layers hopefully portending a future direction for Soldati in general, one is reminded that Chotsourian has directly compared Doom Nacional to the final Los Natas album, 2009’s Nuevo Orden de la Libertad (review here), and certainly a number of the riffs on offer throughout these songs bear that out, that last one included. But if Doom Nacional is on some level Chotsourian engaging with his own legacy, that doesn’t prevent him from creating something new out of that. Los Natas, who began as a more purely desert rock outfit and grew in time into something entirely of their own, may have jammed plenty, but they rarely if ever touched on the same kind of atmospheric doom ground as Ararat, whereas Soldati brings both of those sides together.
Further, it doesn’t work to set them in opposition to each other. That is, to listen to “Los Secretos de Shiva,” with the fuzzy Sabbathian solo giving way to more full-on shove later in its run after the drums and bass drop out and the guitar establishes the riff to come, the two stylistic elements at play work in kind, each to enhance the other one. The greatest success of Doom Nacional — and what makes it most live up to its declaration — is in this aesthetic marriage of form and purpose.
For any debut, it’s only fair to look forward and think of what might come. The question as regards Soldati is how much of a focus the band will take on amid Chotsourian‘s other projects, various collaborations, and so on. As a fan of the more heavy rock-oriented facet of his songwriting and hearing the flow he creates with Fellite and Cassinelli, Doom Nacional presents much to hope for going into subsequent releases, and I’ll say without reservation that it’s one of the best debuts 2020 will see. Perhaps because of that, it’s best to enjoy the captured moment for what it is, regardless of the context of one’s perspective, and let the future worry about itself. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
South American Sludge Records on Bandcamp
