Hugo Race
Ambuscado

LA RECENSIONE

Hugo Race was a member of the Bad Seeds for a while, he left the smoky, stagnant chambers of the Ink King to embark on his own tortuous solo career, which eventually led him to choose Italy as his second home.
Here, together with Marta Collica from Catania, he founded Sepiatone, with whom he plays a stylish, ambient rock that is very akin to Tindersticks or certain trip-hop.

The work Race carries out with the True Spirits is of a completely different nature: a filthy blues where a drawn-out and rough voice paints and sings psychedelic delusions of every kind and color.
Ambuscado is an album that serves as a "collection of revised and corrected tracks": a decade of True Spirits navigating the dreamy sea of stretched and desert-like notes; at times they open up to melodies almost like weary mariachi in "Ducados," at other times they plunge into the purest experimentation on electro beats in the style of Depeche Mode, with the usual shamanic singing that recites religious verses and sings of sex or the smell of Whisky.
The masterpiece, for the author, is in the track "Essential Serbo-Croat," where multiple female voices lay down, drunken, on a carpet of ethnic instruments played as if they were underwater, while the warmth of the environment rises and Indian landscapes hybridized with nocturnal and metropolitan dreams are drawn on the walls.
The time to recover and a cosmic intro explodes: "Komota1," revisited at the end of the album, sung by a true ghost... listen to believe: if there were an ideal music for haunted manors, it would be "Komota".
The blues of "John the Revelator" has nothing to envy from Mark Lanegan for depth and ogre-like voice, gradually ascending towards a dreamlike gospel-style tribute to the God of the abandoned and the downtrodden.

Hugo Race is an artist with 360-degree abilities, who does not compromise with anyone, capable of sound blends and combinations so bizarre they surprise those, somewhat dulled by the alternative-mainstream, who believe that only two or three people do such things...
Race is a psychedelic prophet, singing around Italian clubs, with his guitar, effects, and his laptop, aware of the power of his music, which at times touches pure genius.
Otherwise, tracks like "In The Valley Of The Moon" wouldn't be possible, which seems taken directly from a recording of a paranormal phenomenon as if, in the next room, people who died a long time ago were chatting and playing while a television tuned to an empty channel lights up your eyes, and you fall asleep.