Tropical Fuck Storm
Braindrops

If you have a business name like Tropical Fuck Storm and a title like Braindrops, well then, you have to live up to it. If you then add the chromatic mess of the cover, let's say that, at the very least, you expect chaos, and chaos, dear reader, is exactly what you find here. It may be that from bad dreams come the best songs, it may be that creating and simultaneously destroying has always been one of the most effective aesthetic tricks. So, the matter is roughly this: you start with a general idea, improvise, arrive at something, and then do everything to ruin that something. In short, it's music where nothing is taken away, but added, this with that, that with this, cheese on macaroni, goat and cabbage, etc etc etc. Then, when you really want to go overboard, someone drops a bomb to secretly watch the effect it has. The best are certain ballads under constant assault, the most beautiful of all is called Maria 63.

Maria 63 is so ungainly and crooked that you can't help but wonder how the hell it manages to stand. Then, since despite everything, it stands indeed, you realize that its secret is precisely that loony, swaying pace by which it manages to scale mountains so emotional and so close to excess that, even if at any moment you're expecting an aesthetic disaster, well, that disaster never comes. Then I don't know if it's blues, I don't know if it's folk, or both, or who the hell knows. But I do know that this ragged stuff keeps you hanging by a thread with tension that does nothing but grow, until the uneducated voice is joined by a girls' choir, and the result is a crazy yin and yang, almost gospel, imagine a lightening towards the sky, imagine something rising, to the point that strings even come in, although it's just for a moment, for chaos follows right after, that is, the collapse, that is, the noise, which, I assure you, provides a certain satisfaction. Once everything calms down, on the strings remains just a hum then not even that; twenty seconds of chamber music and at the end a plane passing by like a fart in the sky.

Maria 62, prequel to Maria 63, is another rather extravagant ballad. I think it was recorded on the moon, or at night on the gullies near my house, or else inside the head of a guy caught in "a dream where he hasn't slept for weeks". And, just like that guy, a sound of acid guitar seems to be looking for its wits, or looking for her, and damn, it's all a wander between spells and counterspells, and in this, nothing strange, she is an immortal Nazi witch and he an agent of the Mossad, the story then develops in Maria 63, but there's no way I'm telling you anything more.

"Desert sands of Venus," is a magnificent oddity, placed as an interlude between "Maria 62" and "Maria 63", imagine an absurd guitar lost in the sticky molasses of the sky or, as the title suggests, bogged down in the sands of Venus. In short, a bad trip of our Mossad agent, who, however, once recovered, will reach Buenos Aires on a rainy day, because that's where the immortal Nazi witch has holed up, never mind Aldebaran where, according to those esoteric fools, she fled after Hitler's death. Ah, this isn't actually a ballad, but an instrumental played by drunks.

"Comes out of the gate like an asthmatic racehorse," a guy on the internet says about "Paradise". The guy didn’t like the record and the phrase is meant to be mocking, only then, how the world goes, it seems to me a great compliment instead. Not only is it quite accurate because indeed "Paradise" comes out of the gate like an asthmatic racehorse. Imagine a slow blues with the most crooked voice possible, then imagine the most total absurd and the most ferocious chaos, and I swear that I, although accustomed to strange things, the first time I said "oh come on, you can't do that," only to then change my mind. Sometimes the unlistenable and the wonderful meet halfway.

"Aspirin" starts with some thumps and a guitar moving like a hypnotized snake or a jammed contraption and advances like the nausea when unwanted guests knock on your door. It's the good old antidote to bastard life and sounds real like all the “hits” you've taken. Okay, we’re done with the ballads.

The rest, equally a mess, equally a wonder, is a boiling cauldron on the fire of a groove at least Gargantuan. Take all those late seventies marvels where punk, funk, and various oddities mixed, take the captain, take Felakuti on acid, add the bastard instinct, the energy of the damned, the saving laughter, and the asshole of the world. Ah, last note of merit: the alternation, the chasing, the mingling of male and female voices is wonderful and dizzying.

Finally, I return to Maria 63 which, despite being so strange, is almost classic, if not downright epic. It talks about all the esoteric shit that travels on extreme right-wing websites, the immortal Nazi witch would be nothing more than a fake news. But how can you, starting from a fake news, arrive at the epic? Boh, maybe you have to be born with it. Anyway, the disorder under the sky is great.

Trallallà...