Mud Spencer

Let’s get into the new releases from Argonauta Records, the Italian label dedicated to heavy music in all its meanings. For the first release we have to travel to the other side of the world, to Indonesia, from where an American by the pseudonym Mud Spencer sets fire to the beaches and muds of the island thanks to his fuzz surf stoner with many different inspirations. His new work is titled “Kliwon“.

With the previous release we learned to love but most of all to explore his sound that comes from all sides and makes the listener have a real sensory experience. To harness Mud Spencer’s music in a precise genre would be to do him a disservice, since there is so much in his music that only by listening to it can one understand.

Compared to the debut record that was definitely fuzz, here with the new work we go further with the sonic search, and there are moments in the record that are definitely prog metal but we also find surf and on top of everything, the real alma mater, psychedelia. The record came out of a collaboration with Studio Berserk owned by Monolord drummer Esben Willems, and a new way of writing by Mud Spencer, who here starts from a common root to expand his idea in different directions. “Kliwon” is a slower and more layered record than its predecessor, containing not so much more psychedelic journeys as a different quality of them.

There are four tracks, and all of them are of long duration since they expand very well, with lascivious fare that cannot be resisted. The songs are more structured now, perhaps also due to the fact that in this new work Mud worked on one song at a time, implementing for example the use of keyboards that give a different value to the album. In conclusion a really deep album with lots of variety, we go beyond confirming the good things done in the previous album and with this work we go very far.

Ockra

To talk about the music of Sweden’s Ockra is to talk about a feeling that invests many different things, traveling between different genres, depending on inspiration and the need to tell. This “Gratitude” follows two years after their first work on Argonauta Records, the eponymous ep released in early 2020, just before the worldwide pandemic shutdown. The record was born during that time, amid illness, physical and mental discomfort, and the problems we all endured. Ockra was born in 2018 in Gothenburg out of the dissolution of the stoner doom band Sulphur Dreams. In founding the new trio immediately decided to go beyond stoner and doom, and they definitely succeeded.

“Gratitude” is a record of many influences, their pacing is almost southern rock, with that disenchantment and great search for melody that is central to bands as musically as Ockra. At first listen Ockra’s music might sound simple but it is not at all, the listening proceeds swiftly because it is their skill at weaving multiple sound textures that always keeps the listener’s interest. Their greatest peculiarity is the creation of a distorted and magmatic sound mixture but with a great melodic core, and precisely the balance between abrasiveness and melody is their secret heart. Each track on the record starts in one way and then develops in an unexpected way, all without ever rushing or looking for clever, fast solutions.

The Swedish group leaves the listener in a state of grace, managing to accomplish a catharsis through the telling and playing of our pains and fears in a perpetually anxious world. To make a surely far-fetched but fitting comparison, listening to Ockra is like listening to Pink Floyd, that sonic moment that changes one’s spirit and one’s day, that sweet, warm vibration that gets inside one’s heart and s’, it’s called gratitude.

A record that grows listen after listen, an escape where you are freer, eyes closed and upwind.

Dee Calhoun

Long awaited return of one of America’s leading contemporary singer-songwriters, that Dee Calhoun formerly in Iron Man and Spiral Grave, with a new work again on Argonauta Records entitled ” Old scratch comes to Appalachia.” Dee is enjoying a busy and fruitful career as a dark singer-songwriter, a bard chronicling the lesser-known plagues of the United States and what was there long before it, and with them investigating his and our unconscious.

This work lives on different planes, since in addition to being a record it will be four long stories, the fifth book written by Dee himself, and will be read by Dee and attached as a second CD to the music CD. The music CD is wonderful, a true immersion in the musical and esoteric traditions of Appalachia, a cultural region that originated and developed around the Appalachian Mountains and boasts an incredible number of legends and remarkable historical facts. A place of the American Gothic if ever there was one, Appalachia has been a peculiar region since its ancient inhabitants inhabited it, and here mystery is at home, is accepted, and shadows sometimes dominate the light.

Dee tells a story of a dear lord who goes around using the railroad to tour Appalachia and capture souls in his service, according to an ancient contract that still fools many. Dee uses a lot of traditional instruments to tell these stories, and the record has a great deal of old-fashioned charm, is beautifully produced, and Dee takes us by the hand through dusty places, scarred destinies, and poor choices. ” Old Scratch Comes to Appalachia” is a deeply bluesy record in a gothic way, dark and born at the crossroads of multiple roads, right where the lord who takes souls waits for his future debtors.

The sound is fantastic, the record is a masterpiece of American realism in its deepest and most genuine sense, you can feel the Appalachians and all their past lives up close. Possessions, reborn despair, a nature as powerful as ever and showing itself now benign now malignant, and that very strong taste of gothic blues that Dee gives us. Like other records of recent years it is conceived during the pandemic, which is to be considered as a real creative engine, and takes us back to a time when the difficulties were other and we lived very differently, and certain things we felt closer.

A beautiful record, Dee is unique and this time he has outdone himself.

Beautiful video Troy Darr by Chaos Cartoons, another great strength of this record.