Italian stoners Ufomammut debuted with the
visceral Godlike Snake (2000) in an ultra-heavy space-rock vein.
Snailking (Music Cartel, 2003)
introduced new elements (such as samples and electronics).
Alcool is open-heart surgery: post-psychedelic avantgarde music
with no monster riffs and no vocals, just an abstract eerie soundscape.
Besides the sinister Blotch in the vein of
Amon Duul II,
the highlight is the plastic 28-minute hallucination of
Demontain, whose voodoo-dance beat and electronic whistling
lead again into avantgarde territory until a few minutes from the end,
when the guitar intones a melody that hints at a unifying theme.
Demontain flies beyond the stereotypes of the genre, beyond
psychedelic rock and beyond melodic music: it's a form of dynamic
psychological electroacoustic jamming.
In fact, the mandatory bass rumble of stoner-rock is almost an unwelcome
addition to songs that could stand on their own merits, particularly the
tense desperate noisy ritualistic God and the
lugubrious slow ballad Lacrimosa,
and even the veiled Led Zeppelin ripoff of Odio.
The sonic evolution continued on
Lucifer Songs (Rocket Recordings, 2005) and especially
Idolum (Supernatural Cat, 2008), with the 22-minute Void,
but the group fundamentally remained
faithful to its stoner aesthetics.
The five-movement (mostly instrumental) suite of Eve (Supernatural Cat, 2010) marked perhaps their baroque zenith.
The first movement is simply a 14-minute long repetition of a simple
lugubrious leitmotiv, the ideal soundtrack for a black mass.
The second movement is a calculated progression from a tiny chaos of sounds
to a grandiose orgiastic tribal dance.
The fifth movement is, again, a hynpotic, repetitive dance-trance that only
towards the end unleashes a whirlwind of demented garage jamming.
The only drawback of this new version of Ufomammut is that the music does not
vary much. It is the stoner equivalent of some new-age music that simply
creates a mood in which the listener is supposed to immerse without truly
"listening".
Oro Opus Primum
(Neurot, 2012)
and
Oro Opus Alter (2012)
used the skills honed over a decade to
compose a sophisticated synth-driven esoteric concept.