Sea Of Tombs
S/T

Debaserianly speaking, I had left the excellent Mario Rubalcaba on the stage of the 2008 edition of Roadburn along with his adventure companions Earthless, in the act of showing the world just how big and shiny his crazy drummer's attributes were.

Thanks to a double space-time somersault, I find him on the brink of the new millennium, having recently moved to Chicago and busy pushing the rhythmic cart of these Sea of Tombs, a trio in which he is joined by Bill Skibble on guitar and Jessica Ruffins on bass, both unfamiliar to me.

 "S/T", released in 2001 by Gravity Records, is the first (and only) release from the band and, to be honest, it's like rusty airplane fuselages: six instrumental jam tracks where the heavy blues of Blue Cheer school is stretched, frayed, tousled, nibbled, sanded, loosened, fringed, shredded, diced, and ruffled, in short, drawn out until the total annihilation of the listener's patience.

The intentions were probably the best: to shape the raw hyperfuzz material into something stunning, hypnotic, and possibly trippy.
The result, however, resembles certain Japanese porn.

The female lead is a pretty high school student dressed in a sailor outfit, with a shy yet rather intriguing aura. The male lead is a sleazy and perverted principal who has a very tiny thing that will be censored with at most 3-4 pixels. And then there's a secondary character (e.g., a super nerd classmate secretly in love with the protagonist), who furiously masturbates while spying through the keyhole.
In summary, there could even be some fun to be had, only that from the first scenes, the main and supporting characters start doing "things" that either bore you to death or you don't entirely understand. "Things" that, above all, are repeated to the point of exhausting not only the female protagonist but also the viewer. Until the poetry leaves you, and you return foolishly to your daily affairs without even needing to rinse yourself off.

Just to be clear, Mariolone beats and rolls all the time, which is fun, but without someone to add a bit of color, it feels like listening to the neighbor straightening the fence with a series of pan whacks. Skibble's guitar work is among the worst things I've heard since that time my grandmother went overboard with the chestnut cake: basically, he's a six-string acrobat with broken arms, one leg shorter than the other, blind, mute, deaf, and I suspect even with a whore wife. Boring and clumsy worse than a twelve-year-old facing his first bra clasp. And Ruffins?! Well, not available or something close to it.

In short: an album that should make you take off and instead weighs you down worse than a match of ___________ (national team of the reader's choice among the favorites for the title) at the World Cup.
Obviously highly recommended.