Tito And The Brainsuckers
Star Trash

THE REVIEW

If my son were to ask me "Dad, what's a garage?" I wouldn't hesitate to droolingly respond "Tito and the Brainsuckers! What kind of questions are you asking!" That is, if I had a son, of course.

Setting aside paternal-musical instincts, a reasoned and thorough response would lead the little one to a premature schizophrenic crisis, as at the very least, he would need to endure a lecture on the origins and evolution of the genre, with accompanying forced listens of at least two volumes of "Nuggets", all the "Back From The Grave", "Pebbles" before moving on to entire albums from the Sonics, Seeds, Chocolate Watchband, and so on. Since by the advent of the '80s garage revival, the child would already be on the verge of a crying fit, I would opt for this new release from our favorite Abruzzesi.

There are certainly hundreds of better bands in the garage realm, both in Italy and worldwide, but this latest album by Tito represents an excellent synopsis of the genre, for the benefit of those who have no idea who the aforementioned bands are. Tito and his cohorts don’t even consider elevating the genre through mixing with noise, pop, electronics, or anything else. They play garage in the primal sense of the term, as it crystallized between '65 and '67, allowing just enough time for a fleeting and incestuous fling with sister psychedelia.

What's surprising is the variety of the tracks, almost never built on the usual formula, but full of rhythm changes, boogie deviations ("Say"), funk breaks ("Modkiller") and tribal interludes ("Mirrorball"). Two sacred monsters of the '80s L.A. garage scene could not be missed, Bobby Bones and his majesty Leighton Koizumi, who throw gasoline on the fire of "Just A Little Bit" and "Supernova". On the psychedelic front, Tito shows enviable synthesis abilities: "Astro Dalek" is imbued with space effects that would unsettle the Hawkwind, "Spectrum" dissolves into a cloud of reverberations, while the title track starts slow, then goes wild on the wings of an ante-litteram psychedelic surf.

Certainly, the garage album of the past year.