Orange Sunshine
Homo Erectus

A Clash of Cavemen.

It's not the most fitting definition there is, but it's the first that comes to mind.

Somewhere in the Neolithic.

Crude and hairy hominids with vaguely human features, for some strange and unknown reason, are clashing. They belong to different clans but were all born from the same mud: muscular and agile, the Stooges on one side, noisy with their spears and stones, the Blue Cheer on another, wild and angry, the MC5 on yet another, somewhat old and resentful, the Sonics, provocative and sensual, a black man with bushy hair holding his club backward because he's left-handed. They glare at each other for a few seconds, as angry as snakes, and then go at it fiercely.

Somewhere in the Neolithic, half an hour later.

Silence. Battle over. Near the cave, there are a few survivors; the others are all gone, all on the ground; some will rise years and years later trying to delude others into thinking they're still the iguana they once were, some will get up but never be considered by anyone again, some will never rise again.

The survivors are three.

STOP.

Fast forward 40 years.

Look at them there, motionless for decades, instruments in hand, frozen in the moment before striking. Let's leave them still for a moment and introduce them: Arthur Van Berkel on guitar and pedals (fuzz uber alles), Mehdi Rouchiche on bass, and Guy Tavares: an epileptic gorilla on drums and vocals. Looking closely, it's as if we're still in prehistory... you wouldn't say they made it intact to today. Mind you, they're quite worn out by LSD and various opiates, but they're still young and rough rockers fixated with their dad's records, not old dinosaurs. In fact, Orange Sunshine are not contemporaries of all that fine company above, but they do everything to be so: same equipment of the time, same recording methods, even the same drugs as back then. If you search the record (reissued on CD by the Japanese Leafhound with two bonus tracks), you'll find the recording date stated as: 1969. The difference is nonexistent: this record could have easily been recorded 40 years ago, but it wasn't.

PLAY!

"Hush Hush" and everything becomes clear immediately. Power, aggression, Blue Cheer, MC5, Detroit sound, psychedelia, a guitarist grinding riffs like an obsessed man, fuzz always maxed out, no virtuosity. Motor-blues, garage-punk, and acid proto-hard rock. In short, all the B-sides of America at the end of the '60s. No hippies, no bucolic folk, no flutes and mellotron, no vocal harmonies, no peace and love. Here there’s much less instrumental skill, much less research, much less innovation, but much more sincerity, much more immediacy and rock ‘n roll. A unique, monolithic, and raw sound.

As you can well understand, the tracks of this LP do not shine for originality nor, even less, for variety, thus forming a compact, loud, and deafening lava flow, a long jam that stinks of sulfur and acid. So, listening to "Luv Me", it seems like listening to a stoner track à la Kyuss before Josh Homme was even conceived, in "Magic Ship" there are early Black Sabbath tracks played at 45 rpm, and "Girl, You..." sounds like an outtake from "Vincebus Eruptum".

Then, if you take a look at the cover, there are no longer any doubts. These three Dutchmen are nothing but hippies beyond redemption, with their hands tied, condemned to eternally push bales of marijuana with their chests, forever and the tank beneath them, the sound they produce in our ears.