Mammatus
Mammatus

There are rare clouds, which appear only when the fury of the storm seems to have abated and all other clouds have cleared from the sky. They show up rarely and only in certain parts of our world. They are called "Mammatus": mammaries. Perhaps because it is with them that the sky makes peace with the earth..

The 2006 debut of the singers of the "final battle between amplifiers and sea creatures", hailing from Corralitos, California. Four tracks for fifty minutes of evocative and unstable music, which seems to wrap around itself like a cloud: the space rock of Hawkwind slowly condensing and becoming rougher, more abrasive, touching on the psycho stoner of early Monster Magnet, until it becomes dark and relentless like a storm advancing to the slow and threatening tempo of Sleep.

A continuous chasing and intertwining of distorted guitars and feedback, seventies sounds and butlerian bass lines, doom monoliths and occasional, hypnotic chants of a voice that, being so filtered, seems like a menacing wind lashing the soundscape ("The Righteous Path Through The Forest Of Old" - 9:23). A "cerebral storm" that sometimes repeats obsessively, saturated and suffocating like a dense acid fog ("Dragon Of The Deep Part One" - 8:23), but also knows how to stretch out and ignite like a cloud at sunset, with long breaths of shamanic psychedelia, of tribal dances around the fire, of faces on which time seems to have traced all the roads, paths and dead ends of the world ("The Outer Rime" 5:09).

"Dragon Of The Deep Part Two" (22:13) is music that seems modeled on the water cycle, the soundtrack of a stormy sea: it starts as prey to a languid wave motion, rises slowly, among the spirals of a melody that seems as light as vapor. Slowly, inevitably, it allows itself to be captured by ascending rhythmic currents: grows, swells.. until it explodes with the fury of a tsunami: every hit on the cymbals recalls its roar, the wah wahs are a wind that raises its profile, every guitar chord is the scream of the wave seen breaking into pieces.

And then, slowly, as it began, the fury of the storm subsides. The storm lays down its arms, and the sky can make peace with the earth once more.

Mammatus. The mammaries of the sky. The largest of the clouds.