Saturday, November 16, 2013

... PALM DESERT "Adayoff" (EP review)

Just some months ago Palm Desert from Wroclaw/Poland sparked me with their album Rotten Village Sessions and now they come up with a new release, an EP called Adayoff. Running the risk of spoiling the bottom line, I say this release is something special. It belongs into this category of music I actually don’t want to write or talk about, but I’d rather just say: “Listen to it”, because the essential points about it can’t be described by words appropriately. It’s a case of either you get what’s going on here, or you don’t.

I could, of course, tell you that the EP comprises six songs of exquisite stoner rock and its overall runtime is just short of 30 minutes.
I could tell you that the opener Leave me alone begins with a lot of blues feel put into warm fuzzy guitar sounds, heads into a heavy, stormy rock jam to find its way back to the blues again.
The second track End of the certain is a folky acoustic instrumental, demonstrating how beautiful simplicity can be, with a strong melody and an unboastful but effective  instrumentation. This is the only song that is not drenched in fuzz, but don’t worry, the fuzz comes back immediately with the next song Among the stones, together with a driving rhythm ploughing its groove through fuzzy thickness.
The strong groove continues in the following track Final scream, accompanied by a hypnotic krautrock vibe with lots of drumming goodness and guitar jam.
Dusty brings on some psychedelic moments, slow and mellow, like a daydream in soft warm summer rain. With echoing vocals, extremely relaxed and almost fading out after two-thirds through, it suddenly breaks into a hard driving groove to its end.
The closing track Overload brings yet another facet into the album, female vocals to perfect the spacey entrancing bass driven repetitive rhythms with a beautiful melody.

I could tell you all this and more, but in fact all you need to know is:
This band spends one day in the studio and comes out with this album that sounds breathtakingly soulful. It proves that brilliant musicianship doesn’t necessarily need overly intricate constructions and yet is able to create  exciting music that contains a variety of moods and facets. A kind of laid-back unobtrusive attitude and tons of heartfelt tunes is all these four guys need to create something special.

“Listen to it”

words by Ulla Roschat






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