Valet
Naked Acid

"Volatile Acidity" 

Since I started working in the wine industry, I've developed an unhealthy passion for whites (which I previously avoided like dog poop on the sidewalk, owing to my extreme ignorance), particularly those with a pronounced acidity and preferably young. Don't even show me Amarone, Primitivo, Brunello or anything like that. If I have the choice, I will order a Ribolla Gialla (but not Gravner, a brilliantly insane genius, but his whites are too demanding), a good Sauvignon from Alto Adige, a Verdicchio from my land, and if I can find it, a Riesling Renano would be ideal. I’m not saying the aforementioned wines are bad, just as I’m not saying Interpol are untalented (but ugly, yes), but I now naturally lean towards pronounced acidity, both in drinking and in music. I think that, in one way or another, even Honey Owens, the mastermind behind the Valet project and formerly with Jackie O' Motherfucker, suffers from the same fatal attraction.

Listening to this "Naked Acid" (if it were called volatile acidity, it would fit perfectly), it's clear that Owens is ahead of the game when it comes to enological tastes. She probably makes the wine herself at her home on the American West Coast, perhaps in animal stomachs like the ancient Greeks, but she doesn't add honey or spices, she shoots it raw, earthy, wild, and unmediated. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain the gastritis that the first three tracks could cause you. "We Went There" begins softly as a classic krautrock, adding jingling bells, seductive vocalizations on the shore, a dazed guitar; "Drum Movie" opens a black hole of ambient drone stagnation in which one can easily/fatally get stuck; finally, "Kehaar" speaks a dead language (or seems like someone who really talks to the dead) and moves forward massive and languid in a lysergic fog of atomic dawn.

Honey tries to recover from the aforementioned archeo-wine hangover, improvising a sort of abstract/astral blues ("Fuck You") refracted by a kaleidoscope prism, while someone decides to overlay another track (I swear, they sound like two pieces going their own way!). In short, you've probably already understood that dear Owens is a classic case of eccentricity, and so is her music. It's a typical take it or leave it. An album that could drive you to cut your ears with poultry shears, or leave you ecstatic and perpetually dazed on the couch until you develop bedsores.

I still haven't figured out whether it's a deadly bore, or a message from an alien entity that landed millennia ago on Earth and which I still can't decipher. In the meantime, I open a Tocai Borgo del Tiglio.