La Otracina
Blood Moon Riders

THE REVIEW

"La Otracina is the New Wave of Psychedelic Heavy Metal, a contemporary musical vision exploding with classic influences and mind-warping sonic fusions"

...and if Adam Kriney, musician "avant-garde rock/jazz/noise", owner of the micro label Colour Sound Recording, drummer and/or sound technician of more or less every formation of the Brooklyn psych scene, and - coincidentally - founder of La Otracina, says so, well... then it must be true.

"Blood Moon Riders" ('09) is the third official full-length of the New York band (which, in the meantime, has already produced another CD-R and announced the fourth LP for which a video preview can already be enjoyed) and, incidentally, it is also the last one featuring the Sicilian Ninni Morgia, guitarist of the trio since 2006.

Perhaps just to give the departing mate the honor of arms, Kriney limits his drumming exuberance and, above all, curbs his compositional bulimia. Morgia can thus range from a wild electric ride, full of twists and pirouettes for six strings over drum pounding ("Inner Mind Journey", almost a hypertrophic re-edition of the early Manuel Göttsching), to rarefied soundscapes, drawn by light guitar strokes diluted with massive doses of wah and delay ("Ballad of the Hot Ghost Mama", more or less the sound of a ghost spaceship crossing intergalactic oceans without a crew), or walk the fine line of impudence, sprawling in airy melodies of "Ode to Intergalactic Joy" ("Zunblazer", which really only lacks a chorus of hippies with a rocket-powered Volkswagen and elephant-foot space suit).

The result is an album in which the band's sound center of gravity moves away from the "free-noise" deconstruction of Guru Guru to approach the - still fascinating, yet decidedly less hostile - atmospheres of the early Ash Ra Tempel: it may not boast the delirious exuberance of the colossal "Love Love Love" (an annihilating collage of psychedelia, kraut, and extreme improvisation lasting over two and a half hours), nor the "pleasant hostility" of "Tonal Ellipse of the One", but it can be enjoyed precisely for its greater ease of listening and a capacity for synthesis previously unknown to the New York band.

An album less anarchic, therefore. Less surreal and - let's face it - less deliciously crazy.
But also more lucid and decidedly more "drinkable".