East-Ra
Substitute 3

Summer album reviews part one: the summer album that makes you feel even hotter (and possibly a bit anxious)

I don't know about you, but when I imagine Croatia in the summer, I start to suffocate. I'm not talking about seaside Croatia, but the sweltering inland that it shares with all of Southeast Europe. Dry stone walls and tall withered plants, little wind, and a perpendicular sun, nonexistent shade, and plenty of humidity. In my imagination, I also see a low stone house far away among the heatwaves, without a door, the interior not visible, among uncultivated fields. As you get closer, you hear strange sounds. Sinister, off-kilter. A few more steps. You can now distinguish lanky figures swaying in the shadow inside.

I don't know about them, but when I listen to them, I can't imagine anything different. A bit of research then leads me to discover that the album features traditional instruments and, I believe, some local dialect pieces. I’d say the circle completes. A trio of super isolated oddballs and thus even more off-track. Actually, I don't want to create high expectations; the album is what you imagine, even by seeing the cover (beautiful): psych maybe with a bit of noise. What you might not imagine, however, is the sluggish, lethargic flow of the tracks, very useful for those postprandial breathlessness episodes on a sticky couch, which I am sure I am not the only one experiencing these days. Moreover, these East-Ra guys surprise me with their harmonic-melodic solutions, although I can't say if they follow rules of their folk tradition or simply don't care about the keys. Probably a bit of both. Anyway, from a compositional standpoint, they are both original and in a certain sense memorable: if you manage to listen to the album twice, I'm sure the pieces will have at least seeped into you a bit. Moreover, in my opinion, if you love psychedelia, a track like "Amanita" with the delirious core duo and its maniacal atmosphere should evoke quite a lot. Other parts of the album utilize fairly destabilizing sound collages, but fortunately, never resolve into the self-indulgence we all fear finding in albums of this kind. A subtext, if not of meaning, at least of purpose is always present, even though perhaps because of this the atmosphere becomes heavier. Because yes, it's not an easy album, at least not very much. It does have some footholds, though: there is pop underneath, in my opinion not even too low-brow, only buried under a plethora of very hot colors (but also a lot of black: the feeling of the macabre is not rare). Like when the heat makes you pale and you lose strength. That's it, I like it. In that case (and only that one) I justify a Coke.

I have no threads to pull because I've tried to describe the album in full. I realize that if you are hot, you don't want to feel even hotter, but occasionally, such an experience is worth it. And if you like the '80s-'90s American freak scene, like Trumans Water or Thinking Fellers or Caroliner, or if you enjoy the more meditative Faust, or the early Animal Collective, this is an album not to be missed, a vacation you'd never want to go on.