vote
7.5
- Band:
MEIFU - Duration: 00:42:54
- Available from: 05/07/2024
- Label:
-
Argonaut Records
The Florentine quintet Meifu firmly roots itself in the Italian underground scene, leveraging the joint effort of members and ex-members of Necromorbid, Vij, Lord Elephant and Sorelle Trapasso, and presents itself with a debut album (“Haunted Dreams”) that follows by two years the first piercing cry in the form of a demotape.
Produced by Argonauta, the natural Italian cradle for these sounds, the album is composed of six tracks with a strong space stoner/doom imprint, grouped around a single and hypnotic psychedelic ritual, in which much of the charm lies in the ability to recognize traditional influences (Black Sabbath, Sleep and Hawkwind) without however indulging in excessive devotion to the sound of their inspirers.
From the cover art (in which illustrator Silvicius carefully mixes heterogeneous suggestions, from Hokusai's “A Great Wave off Kanagawa” to Jodorowsky's “Enchanted Country”), “Haunted Dreams” confuses reality and dream, revealing itself with a psychedelic instrumental incipit (“Cubensis”) that soon collapses into “Third Eye Invocation”, whose vocal lines are the offspring of the esoteric Paul Chain of “Alkahest” and “In the Darkness”, while the Middle Eastern melodies that make their way along the homage to Dopelord of “Turkish Kraken” could be the sonic accompaniment of an excursion through the dunes of Arrakis.
If the music contained in this album is fascinating and convincing, it is Mari's (Sorelle Trapasso) contribution that constitutes an added value to the project, thanks to her ability to move agilely from the shamanic tones of the aforementioned “Third Eye Invocation” and “Battle Of Chapultepec” (a muffled version of High On Fire's “Surrounded by Thieves”) to the more traditional doom singing (“Steerpike”, the best song of the lot and a potential single, where the hardest rock Blood Ceremony ideally accompany a witchy Patti Smith).
Finally, everyone heads home, still stunned by the incense breathed during the ceremony, with the electric sway of “So Magic” (already proposed in the debut demo and here revisited by the excellent work of Lorenzo Bellia of Audiovolt Studio, good at coloring the guitars with a brilliance that brings them closer to those of Windhand), an epilogue that exploits all the experience of the rhythm section, between changes of atmosphere and sudden rarefactions that recall the recent experiments of Messa.
“Haunted Dreams” is, ultimately, a treacherous debut, which lets the listener delve into it and then disorients him, seduces him and hides the way out forever. Come on, let yourself be harnessed.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM