I Hate seem to manage to dig in all the right places and unearth pure alchemical gold from the most unlikely sources. This time they have gone deep into the Bible Belt of Salt Lake City in Utah and struck the jackpot with this all girl band, whether the music derives from heaven or hell is uncertain, that is for you to make your mind up as it unfolds. As far as I am concerned it has a sincere arcane spirituality about it. This is no easy band to pigeonhole, the list of descriptive comparisons on the groups MySpace page list a veritable feast of influences and to be sure there is a little bit of each and every one of them to be heard on Strega. However this is an album everyone will probably think of other sources when listening to it, perhaps nothing is quite what it seems although the statement, “Black Magick, Baby,” is not one that is going to be disputed in the slightest.
Apparently this is the group’s second album following 06 self released ‘The Worm Has Turned’ which I am dying to hear. The ladies all contribute to this cauldron but Rebecca Vernon who has been a drummer since 12 writes all the music and it is full of mystery and intrigue and fuzz laden low end bass noise which literally shakes, rattles and rolls, like a sermon from above.
‘Sugar Creek’ comes in with sweet low vocals and a Stooges like guitar chord before everything else explodes around it. Electric Violin is in there eerily shuddering in the background and bass is heavy and thick up front. Vocally things change throughout the album as all the band seem to be involved, one time you could think of PJ Harvey (who the band certainly list) at others L7 and in the case of second number ‘Crucible’ Siouxsie Sioux. In fact this at times really reminds me of The Banshees gone extreme doom and cites the early albums The Scream through to Kaleidoscope. The Gothic violin sound really adds to this as it gleams away like fluttering Bauhausian bats in the backlight. There is also the fact that by pure chance there is a number called ‘Christine.’ No Lennon penned hazy sweet drug bliss going on in this one though but a bad trip unwinds with the number palpably oozing danger and fractured distress, this Christine is a broken doll lying in pieces.
The title track chills things out and takes the edge off a bit. Vocals are allowed to harmonise over the ever present fuzz of the instrumentation, this is where the spiritual side of things starts to shine through. There are a couple of numbers here that really do sound part and parcel of the bands geographical landscape. ‘Isaac’ and ‘Go Down Moses’ lyrically are biblical and I am sure lyrics like ‘And if God himself were to knock upon my door, I’d turn him away and say I have no more to give” are probably songs from the fields and chain gangs. ‘The Hours I Keep’ has me going back to my Siouxsie fixation; well lyrically it is a song comparable to ‘Mother Oh Mein Papa’ as well as the vocals not being a million miles away. Also something else I keep coming back to during the album is the violins, at times they sound like they have escaped from Hawkwind, circa Warrior At The Edge Of Time as they flutter away.
Having said all this Strega is in no way derivative in the slightest, I put it all down to the fact that there is a wealth of ideas on this album and it is impossible not to pick up on something on it. In a way that just adds to the timelessness of the album. It is the sound of dusty streets where Amish wander round shunning the local community, it is the sound of times gone by, it is the sound of purest alchemical magick. There will be gold!
www.myspace.com/subrosatheatre
