Dzjenghis Khan
Dzjenghis Khan

THE REVIEW

Introduction:
I confess that, for a moment, I considered not reviewing the album, just adding this link:

Live at Batcave 2008

so that the sounds and images would speak more than a thousand words...
Then, however, when I was as determined as a stud stallion just arrived in an equine boudoir, appeared to me in a dream the robust and conspiratorial "Chief Editing Officer" who, very angrily, was inveighing against me in an idiom unknown to most, full of curly brackets and "antzichenon"...

At that point, I understood that perhaps it was time to behave. And here we are...

The "where" is San Francisco, California (USA).
The "when" is 2007.
The "who" are three mangy stray dogs, with the aesthetic taste of a shabby bohemian without a fixed abode. The kind, just to be clear, who in movies show up at a friend's house at two in the morning with a:"Listen, could you put me up? I'm fine even on the couch. It's just for a few days... just until I convince my mother to take me back home...".

They share Rizla and label with the super Dutch zamatauri Orange Sunshine, they play pure seventies school hard fuzz, primitive and ignorant, borrowing from the proto heavy blues of their fellow townsmen Blue Cheer the acid and itching guitar work, the barbed wire used instead of ordinary D'Addario strings, and compensating for the absence of a deafening drumming à la Paul Whaley with massive doses of sweat, punkish attitude and a desire to do harm borrowed from the Detroit school.

They alternate enjoyable regurgitations of the Experience stripped of all Hendrixian guitar frills ("Wildcat"), with furious hard blues rides from which an ill-concealed tendency to instrumental jamming ("Black Widow") emerges, and they even indulge in the luxury of a swerve into the most raw and immanent psychedelia, recovering the obsessive drumming à la Hawkwind and recycling it as a (flying) rhythmic carpet for the twisting of hypnotic and stunning guitar and bass lines ("Rosie").

No rock star poses, more enthusiasm than personal hygiene, production that rather than "Garage" would be called "Hand Car Wash" and sounds more low-fi than vintage: they pay tribute to their supposed fathers with the full awareness that it will certainly not be up to them to rewrite the history of rock, but it's still worth throwing themselves into it like porn stars at the first "Action!".

Fundamental-Indispensable-Unmissable? Oh God, no!
Useless-Negligible-Avoidable? Perhaps.
Fun? Sure...

"Khan had long hair, we got long hair.
Khan loved eating meat and bangin' chicks and so do we.
If Dzjengis Khan had a hard 'n' heavy rock 'n' roll band it would pretty much sound like us"