From Word to Flesh

Mamuthones

‘From Word To Flesh'

How does one approach the morning after a party for the end of the world? This is a question which Mamuthones had to ask themselves, in following up their last album for Rocket, 2018's Fear On The Corner. Replete with psychedelic fortitude and beat-driven hedonism, it's an album that summons a kind of ecstatic fatalism, and initially the band were angling to take this approach and atmosphere further, until their more techno inspired direction was waylaid by the forced insularity of the pandemic. "Yes, a lot has happened indeed and I can easily say that the fears that our previous album was centered around all brutally became all too real"reckons Mamuthones mainman Alessio Gastaldello.

Nonetheless, from the aftermath of this uncertain period has risen the still more flourishing realm of From Word To Flesh -a colourful and multi-faceted creation very much befitting the outsider spirit of Rocket's new Black Hole imprint. Drawing on a broad canvas of influences, its more personal approach has heralded a collection of vibrant mantras driven by ritualistic abandon and rich with psychotropic radiance.

Paradoxically, it touches on the spirit by which the band began to nurture the Italian occult psychedelic sound for which they first became renowned, whilst venturing on an odyssey into new terrain. “I believe that with this album a circle has been closed”reflects Alessio “We returned to the atmosphere of the first Mamuthones albums with the skills acquired throughout the journey, with new sounds and with new creative processes. I would say that what remains constant –and at the core of our music –is the obsessive rhythms and the search for a sonic rituality: this is for certain our trademark”.

This is clear right from the curtain raiser 'Burn From Inside', which beams the emotive approach of the band through the shamanic prism of Coil'sApe Of Naples. From there, hypnotic repetition marries to abstract abrasion (as on 'A Cage Full Of Sins') and mournful laments (‘Before You Leave’) with equal finesse, as redolent of the spiritual zest of Popol Vuh and Ash Ra Tempel as the gnostic folk of Six Organs Of Admittance. Elsewhere 'A Symmetry Of Faith' summons a union of post-punk and psychically charged folk aligned with the recent work of Bristol's Beak, whilston the fearsome treatise 'Son Of Myself' Alessio even invokes the final speech of Werner Herzog's Aguirre -The Wrath Of God, although Alessio is wry on whether his spiritual quest is comparable; "I would like to see that what I share with both Herzog and Aguirre is the conquest of the useless, but I’m not that presumptuous".

"Every morning I wake up and think “I wonder what could happen today”and almost every day there is something that startles me, a new horror that I would never have imagined"he notes "I think this mood can be found in these new songs. However, sometimes surprisingly, there are even sparse moments of hope, glimpses of unexpected light in the darkness".

The Sardinian ritual of the Mamuthones –in which sinister masked figures weighed down with cattle bells conduct a ceremonial procession to ward off evil forces -has gone on for some two thousand years, and opinions thus vary as to its origins or meaning. Yet perhaps the most plausible explanation is that these ghoulish avatars are engaged in a celebration of the endless cycles of death and rebirth, fortifying spirits for a new epoch.

Amidst the chaos and tumult of the 2020s, the band of this name -steadfast and spiritually bolstered against adversity -has undergone just such a change themselves, and ‘From Word To Flesh’ is the fruit of their struggle. As Alessio says “The new album is undoubtedly a reflection on ourselves, on our feelings, on our doubts, on our delusions too. With this album I think the Mamuthones have never been so unmediated, so naked: all masks gone”.

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