Death In Vegas
The Contino Sessions

Tim Holmes and Richard Fearless are out of time, yet well immersed in their time, their sound intentionally emerges from the specters that come out of a forest of memories where Elvis The Pelvis, William Gibson, and the hum of the camera of Jodorowsky and Arrabal (great satanists) coexist.

This album released at the end of the last millennium is so far their best work: where they really demonstrate that everything, if recycled with great care, can be elevated to an expression of art, yes, because from the ashes they can resurrect anything, it's enough to sample, to delve into the flour sack of others, to believe in the philosophical anguish of matter in constant transformation.
The palette is immense, everything has already been discovered, all that remains is to take with full hands and re-sew destabilizing what already sounded cool and thanks to expert hands will sound curucucùl (a bit like in reviews, we are not born experts, one begins to speak by quoting others' phrases, nothing is invented, one is not the author of a damn thing, indeed, it is precisely arrogance to believe oneself the author of anything, you take a bit here and a bit there, you blend everything with your own personal sensitivity to come up with something different, that's all you can do), and that is exactly what modern artists like Death in Vegas do, they resurrect the beats of "twist and crawl," project the western hologram into the screamadelicized and exterminated megalopolis, hunting for memories, for sounds buried in the necropolis of artists, to transform them into the amplified beats of a Golem with a faulty pacemaker.

Gospel choirs, deep basses, dense dark atmospheres, estranging effects, and lunatic soundscapes that add intensity, while distorted guitars give the blend the right psychedelic aroma, at times it seems to return in the mind to the smoky UFO club of swinging London in the '60s, their sessions and their live shows have the energy of a rock concert, even though they are far from rock culture, and closer to the big beat wave, their work is almost uncategorizable, some have spoken of sound trash, indeed this is an apt term to understand these alchemists of groove, an anomalous crossover that mixes garage band noises with dirty bass lines, dub reggae, pop art suggestions, and an imagery close to the great noir of the '40s, the mythical Detour by Ulmer, I Gangsters with Burt Lancaster and the divine Ava Gardner, The Asphalt Jungle by John Houston.

So Death in Vegas is not the usual sampladelic pair of studio rats in love with break-beat, but they are endowed with a broader perspective that includes not only samplers and sequencers but also various instruments of their own, guitars and vocal parts along with visual artworks where they manage to actually cross a broad emotional and stylistic range continuing the work of rapprochement between dance and rock sanctioned by the collaboration with Jesus and Mary Chain and with the great Iggy Pop in the track "Aisha," the iguana pervertedly declaims riding the sensational beat in question, in "Flying" they try to nullify any kind of barrier between dark and psychedelia, perhaps the most successful piece on the album, an enveloping sound, Sixties-style keyboards in cosmic ups and downs, cerebral iterativity, reverb of magnitude 2, heavy drum echoes and gloomy bass lines strongly influenced by Jah Wobble ex P.I.L., in "Lever Street" they play a Gospel on the organ with the black matron of the moment intent on orgasming flower-power declamations, and still: catatonic industrial trip-hop like "Death Threat," fractal collages rich in flashes, pulsations, seductive melodies partly attributable to certain abstract psy-trance with reprocessed vocalizations ("Dirge"), partly to the darker areas ("Soul Actioneer").

Perfect for the omnivorous, stateless individuals of the digital-vintage union.