The Grease Arrestor
Volume Two

Hopelessly devoted to you.

And we were all in love with Olivia Newton John.

There are five of them, they're from Sydney, and among them orbits a delightful female vocalist. You can sense from the album cover that she is slender and has gorgeous hips. Formed in 2012, an enveloping whirl of twelve-string guitars, '60s organs, pulsing rhythm section, and layered vocals, their philosophy is stubborn, independent, and handcrafted.

The album speaks of someone who is no longer here; in many cases, those who are absent can prove more central than those present. Maybe it's just John talking about the memory of the blazing Olivia, or maybe there's something more.

60's Golden Age, evoking The Byrds, 13th Floor Elevators, and The Electric Prunes. Jangle guitars and vintage organs are a love letter to that era that leaves little doubt. And the 90's, with shoegaze elements and just a touch of post-punk honey intertwined with krautrock spores, the fuzz deployed with parental controls, that sedated and meditative but never aimless drone. And then their snack-time companions, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Babe Rainbow, and The Dandelion; they fit within the same Australian neo-psychedelic current, while maintaining their own sound identity that's more ethereal and less garage. Throwing the dart, the magnet always lands near “Come Together”, an embracing panel between Velvet, Byrds, and MBV tones; the drums are crisp and metronomic, with references to German motorik, while the bass guides the harmonic progression with simple but effective lines. The ideal listen for those who are always on the move and dislike stagnation, "Volume Two" by The Grease Arrestor presents itself as a work of sonic transmutation, an initiatory journey that echoes the principles of spiritual alchemy: the superfluous is burned away to make space for the essence. The twelve-string guitars and '60s organs are the mercury and sulfur merging, creating a sound that penetrates and dyes the soul, just like the tincture described by Avicenna in his alchemical treatise.

The jangle melodies approach those of The Byrds, but filtered through the kaleidoscopic prism of Temples and The Asteroid #4. There’s something of The Warlocks too, but without the darkness, as if their gloom has been sublimated into light. The Grease Arrestor seem to have read the Corpus Hermeticum and decided to translate it into sound waves, where every riff is a seal, every harmony a talisman, every rhythm a magic formula. The album is a star map that links Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd to the Allah-Las, passing through Spacemen 3 and The Lucid Dream, but with an alchemical coherence that transforms influence into musical gold. And immersed in this golden layer of glitter – listening to “John Paul” wherever you are, amidst the essences of this psychedelic distillate vibrating like a musical athanor; in the memory of Olivia and of those no longer present, let yourself be carried away by the alchemical medium that transforms sound into an ontological bridge. Each track is a threshold, a passage between the visible and the invisible, where vibration becomes memory and melody becomes spirit, through those feminine hips that sway dancing around a bonfire, that slender body breathing through the drone and pulsing through the jangle, that transference, where the listener projects and receives, encounters what was lost, what is no longer present in the material world but still vibrates and shines in the archetypal field.

Glory to you, Olivia and to all the brilliant friends who are no longer with us. The album speaks of someone who has probably passed on, and in many cases the absent can prove more central than those present; maybe c'è only John talking about the memory of the blazing Olivia, or maybe c’è something else.