JuJu
Our Mother Was A Plant

I rarely find myself writing about Italian musicians. This happens because I am generally not very interested in what happens within our borders from a musical point of view. The general feeling is that there is a flourishing scene of a specific type of singer-songwriters and a certain indie aesthetic that are prevalent today and that, in any case, a certain principle of self-referentiality applies. Everything operates as a real closed circuit where all parties involved, musicians, labels, and industry professionals, join forces to keep the show going.

At the same time, it’s undeniably clear that even within our musical landscape there are exceptions and artists who are particularly talented, especially musicians who have the courage to look beyond our borders and try to offer something different. Sonic Jesus, New Candys, Father Murphy, and more recently the Gluts, are bands that in recent years have garnered a certain attention and respect, probably more abroad than in our country, by releasing under various foreign labels that welcomed these entities into their roster. Among them is Fuzz Club Records which, on this occasion, presents us with an LP by JuJu, the solo project of Sicilian musician Gioele Valenti (already known as Herself and for being part of the Lay Llamas) titled 'Our Mother Was A Plant'.

The collaboration between Valenti and Fuzz Club Records obviously didn’t happen by chance: the sounds of the record indeed align with a specific type of music proposed in recent years by the label and some developments in European neo-psychedelia. We are faced with a particularly ambitious project where Valenti aims to blend together certain obsessive psychedelic sounds and an ethnic folklore as well as what can be considered as an authentic black-music groove, looking to episodes from the seventies like Sly Stone & The Family Band or Parliament/Funkadelic. A reference also visible from the cover image which is evidently infused with 'black power'.

The album opens with 'Death By Beautiful Things', a lengthy session lasting almost seven minutes and characterized by the obsessive repetition of the same bass loop in typical kraut-rock patterns, over which acidic guitars and visionary, shamanic atmospheres, akin to experiences by Dead Skeletons and Goat, alternate. The latter are not coincidentally one of the main references: one of the band’s members, the masked percussionist Capra Informis, participates in the recordings of the album, collaborating on two occasions. 'In A Ghetto', a track dominated by the obsessive sound of bass and guitars that results in a colorful explosion of sounds, suggests tribal dances where dancers move frenetically, all aligned and wearing gigantic and fearsome masks; 'Sunny After Moon', which opens almost like a piece by Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd ('Lucifer Sam') and then blossoms into a little tableau of danceable kraut tribalism.

'And Play A Game' revisits in the rhythm section certain pulsations typically kraut: the guitars play in perfect Amon Duul II style and in the finale breach the wall of sound with 1960s psychedelic suggestions and a certain Dead Skeletons mantra.

'James Dean' is one of the best-achieved episodes of the album, perhaps - it must be said - also because it is one where Valenti dares less, relying on a monolithic and powerful kraut in the style of Wooden Shjips, characterized by certain wave nuances as in the Fuzz Club tradition.

'I Got You Soul' and 'Patrick', on the other hand, are perhaps the most ambitious episodes where the drums and bass are marked by a typically funk and acid groove, with the first composition reminiscent of a more primitive Primus, while the second sees a blend of the sound with a certain electronic trance and extremely acidic electric guitars that recreate the atmospheres of action movie soundtracks typical of the eighties-nineties. A nearly glossy style, also presented in the lengthy session of 'What A Bad Day', whose bass line seems almost identical to the famous Queen hit 'Another One Bites The Dust', and the sound is occasionally interspersed with reverberations, distant echoes of tribal choruses, synthesized modules, and again seventies-acidic electric guitars and in Amon Duul II style.

'Our Mother Was A Plant' is ultimately an album that certainly deserves to be listened to for the wealth of ideas Gioele Valenti proposes within a work that, in its entirety, does not quite succeed in its aims: the references to black music and funk in general, as well as to a certain experimental and intellectual jazz in Heliocentrics' style, remain incomplete. But although it is a work half-achieved, the sounds are nonetheless enveloping and characterized by a groove that will surely appeal to listeners of Goat, Moon Duo, Follakzoid, who might at this point consider it as one of their albums of the year.