Savage Republic
Customs

 The first thing that immediately catches the eye when looking at the track-list of this album is the title of the long central track: "Rapeman's First EP", which means "Rapeman's first EP," known as "Budd EP" (year of our Lord 1988). Now one might wonder: how could a piece of music with such a title sound? A tribute to Albini, clearly. Okay, but...what type of tribute? A cover? A fond parody? A medley of his most ramshackle non-riffs? A plagiarism? A suggestive rehash like the one the ravenous Kid Rock recently reserved for the legendary "Sweet Home Alabama"? None of that: "Rapeman's First EP" is nothing but a dream. The dream that someone from Savage Republic must have had the night after listening for the first time to those 7 indescribable minutes that characterize "Budd," one of the most extreme (in every sense) results of Steve Albini's artistic and human journey.
 It does happen, sometimes, to have strange dreams. Some of them focus, instead of on people or places, on songs. It happens that, just as the people or places that appear in dreams show up differently from how they are in reality, these songs "sound" differently from how they have always been perceived by our ears (in waking state). And so you wake up with a sound, a melody, a rhythm, a voice in your head that you attribute to a known song, which in reality is made up of sounds, melodies, and rhythms that do not correspond to those dreamt. They don't match outwardly, but...perhaps it is just a deception? a mask? an illusion? Perhaps the "true" essence of the song is the one we have dreamed of? Well, here I pass the ball to psychologists; otherwise, I'll get lost, but I truly believe that "Rapeman's First EP" is exactly what Savage Republic dreamed "Budd" to be. Only one thing formally unites the real version from the dreamt one, and it is (not coincidentally) the crucial moment of the track: that "Motherfuckeeeeers!" which seems to come directly from the bowels of the Earth... Everything else is disguised: clangors and dissonances, minimalism and cacophonies, eruptions and silences, everything that belongs to Albini's DNA is re-presented to us by Savage Republic in a form alien to us.  The effect is disorienting; the dream is actually a nightmare: "No! It can't be! This can't be the Albini I know! There's something about him that doesn't convince me...help! I want out!".

 This memorable piece of meta-music (in fact, let's even say metaphysics) named "Rapeman's First EP" appears as the most surreal, unsettling, and intellectual moment of the album, but it certainly doesn't exhaust the good reasons to listen to "Customs." The sultans of Californian trance indeed reveal themselves to be in better form than ever and succeed in the attempt to craft a convincing recap of their musical proposal. The rest of the album is evenly divided between new wave legacies (the suffocating opener "Sucker Punch", between Neubauten and P.I.L., capable of shocking as in the early '80s, but enriched by measured formalism, by elegance that never turns into polish and that doesn't consume even a crumb of impact), ethnic excursions with a kraut flavor ("Sono Cairo", "Mapia", "Song For Adonis", three exciting flights over lands distant in space and time) and explicit tributes precisely to the aforementioned vegetables, the great German adventurers of the '70s: Neu and Can particularly for the geometric "The Bird Of Pork", while in the substantial mix of "Archetype" echo the Faustian exploits of "Miss Fortune" or even the oneiric suspension and blurred uncertainty of Pink Floyd's "Careful With That Axe, Eugene".

Good night and...sweet dreams!