By Monk
Now and again, I love to shove on an album that I can just play in the background while I’m doing much more mundane stuff (like deleting most of the 1000+ emails we receive every day), but then finding that I have to sit up and take notice because this is something much more that, but possesses elements which just force me to stop what I’m doing and pay a little bit more attention than I originally intended…
‘Cosmic Evoked Potentials’, the fourth album from Italian self-styled “doomdelic instrumental space prog rockers” L’Ira Del Baccano is just such as an album, as I was just nestling into the ambient, trippy groove of opening track ‘The Strange Dream Of My Old Sun’ when a searing guitar riff almost literally exploded out of my brand new speakers and straight into the deepest recesses of my aural cortex. Holy fuck, these guys know how to twist generic preconceptions on their head, as they combine the psychedelic alacrity of early Hawkwind with the crunch of nascent Sabbath and the hypnotic jazz grooves of the likes of Colosseum or Amon Düül.
‘Cosmic…’ does indeed evoke plenty of potential in terms of the ability to bend our minds and test our limits: the first two tracks alone come in at an epic 25+ minutes, which is longer than a lot of albums these days, with the second living up to its title of being an improvisation, albeit by a band who seem so intuitively and quite possibly psychically linked to one another that they know when too much is too little and vice versa.
Third track ‘The Electric Resolution’, with its psych-pop-prog ‘Signals’-era Rush meets Floyd’s ‘Animals’ groove, is perhaps the most accessible of the five, possessing a commercial edge but not sacrificing the epic spacescapes which the opus as a whole generates and encapsulates, as it flows with ease and fluidity from one track to the next, with each adding new aspects to the overall sonic effect (such as the subtly neat blues harmonica at the beginning of the title track).
‘Cosmic Evoked Potentials’ is an essential addition to the collection of any fan of the multiple generics of psychedelic progressive space rock, but will also appeal to those of the more ambient aspect of the doom mien. Me? Well, I think I’ve found my CD of choice for dealing with all that fucking (virtual) paperwork…
- ‘Cosmic Evoked Potentials‘ is out now.
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