Truckfighters
Phi

THE REVIEW

I have spent the last five years predominantly listening to music that can be classified as 'stoner', gathering bands from all over the globe. There are trillions of groups in Europe alone that chase each other's tails and ideas, so every ten albums you can hope to find a track that sounds "original" to you. At the hundred millionth cloned album, I said enough: I committed myself to a detox cure based on any other kind of music.

But I couldn't make it through the rehabilitation.

Because, as we know, the genre is overhyped as it is derivative by nature and repetitive by choice, but every now and then two or three groups stand out from the crowd, and it's a good and right thing. Thus, it happens that next to the entry rock'n'roll stoner psych alongside the note "see Truckfighters" it is written: stuff that shifts the earth's axis with barrages of sound waves.
The headline of their MySpace page proudly states "Heavy Fuzzrock from Sweden!" while in the circle of stonedelics frequenting the file-sharing channel known as Soulseek, people still talk about their previous "Gravity X" as one of the most interesting albums in the scene. And rightly so.

The new package of "Phi" is pure stoner cubed, full of drone riffs hyper-amplified to the point of incredulity, yet crafted with an unusual guitar expertise for the field. Discontinuous polyrhythms in a rollercoaster rise/fall, last-second stop'n'gos, melodic breaks like the calm before the storm, and heavy re-entries of bass and guitars. A trip like "Chamelion" alone is worth the whole ride; because you can't start like a surface-to-air missile and end on a carpet of acoustic guitars and violins while keeping everything absolutely credible. Ten tracks for a barrage of sounds that feels like nothing else in the world and rehabilitates the ability to develop its own language in the maze of stoner-rock.

The Truckfighters are the solid edge of a fine 15-centimeter slab of marble.
And by repeatedly hitting it, the wolf loses its hair but not its habit.