Maserati
Inventions for the New Season

The post-rock season seems never-ending, still breathing its gentle breath over our rusted antennas. Having reached their third album, Maserati (Athens, Georgia) once again attempt to revive the glory of bygone days with the most classic and recognizable psych+space+hard formula. Behind the drums is Jerry Fuchs (formerly of !!! and Juan McLean). Inventions For The New Season owes much to its drummer for emerging from the anonymity into which it would almost certainly have fallen, thanks to his mathematically perfect, drum machine-like rhythmic foundations.

The result is three-quarters of an hour of time-travel: to the seventies of Pink Floyd ("Inventions", the opening track, with a long guitar intro setting the stage for the explosive drumming, "Show me the Season", with Waters-like bass dictating the pace), to the eighties of Mogwai ("Kalimera", only guitars in maxi reverb, "Synchronicity IV", a long ride with a single arpeggio stretched to its limits, the concluding "The World Outside", square start, central electric wall, downhill finish, "Kalinichta", a little guitar intermezzo that picks up the discourse of "Kalimera"), and to the nineties of Ozric ("12/16", rhythm changes and a heavily pounded finale, "This is a Sight We Had?"?, synthetic and rhythmic).

As this tedious description shows, we are in that faint borderline territory between citation and plagiarism, though I like to keep both feet in the former hemisphere and grant Maserati the benefit of the doubt, thus absolving them. It might be because I love traveling down roads familiar to me, because I grew up in the post-everything era, because of the fiery cover illustrating a sick and surreal landscape, or simply because I'd go anytime, to any concert, of any cover band of the aforementioned references. And just imagine going there in a luxury Italian car?