Ufomammut
Lucifer Songs

LA RECENSIONE

Sound waves that shake the earth and make the soles of shoes vibrate. If you look up, with a telescope you might see them: livid streaks, pieces of hyperspace melting between conflicting magnetic fields.

Ufomammut is the sound produced by the collapse of a planet swallowed by a black hole. Poia, Urlo, and Vita, after two albums of excellent craftsmanship (Godlike Snake and Snailking) and numerous contributions to substantial works (notably, Stone Deaf Forever and Blue Explosion - Tribute to Blue Cheer), return with a monumental EP – five tracks on CD, six on vinyl for a total duration of about 35 minutes – accompanied by a DVD that decodes and translates into video the mental and sensory exploration of this Lucifer Songs.

Hallucinatory and hallucinating soundscapes, in a perfect fusion of sound-images that recontextualize that experience of sensory perception overload characteristic of psychedelia. But that's not all, because the sound of Ufomammut is something that fills, that shakes, and that stirs in a dark blend of drones skirting ambient, telluric proto-stoner attacks, and noisy post-rock slurries.

"Blind" picks up where "Hopscotch" left off – in the previous Snailking – seeming like an insistent but more expanded tail, wrapped around that voice sample that seems to dictate the timing of the bass and wicked guitars. "Hellcore" revives the raw sounds of Motorpsycho's "Fleshharrower" combined with the psychic fury of Neurosis; "Hypnotized" is an isolationist and desert drone that responds to the infernal printing method invented by Earth. "Mars" calls together all demons, including those of High On Fire, and here Urlo's voice -just within the control threshold- is a muffled and almost distant sound that drags down the metallic fury of the piece. "Astrodonaut," on the other hand, is a pure hyperspace trip, it's the void in the lungs and no longer the oxygen, the astronaut who has lost the helmet and is silently sucked into the immense cosmos before imploding. In the end, the title track "Lucifer Song" (wonderful bonus that rewards the purchase of the dear, old vinyl!) is like the echo-sounder of a gigantic submarine lost at the bottom, among the black algae of the sea of another planet. Metallic, dark, hypnotic, and milky like a moon between the clouds, "Lucifer Songs" is an authentic challenge, the sin of 'hubris' of Ufomammut.

Simply put, a wonderful record and experience, reminiscent of the stage immediately preceding darkness when the last perceptions become misty and there's just enough time to watch the colors around change, suddenly less warm and a little more vaporous. It's an infinitesimal, suspended time. The vertigo of a cosmic nothingness...