BREAKIN DOWN – Miss California

Inverse 2014

BREAKIN DOWN - Miss California

BREAKIN DOWN –
Miss California

Italian gonzoid blues running amok – nasty ‘n’ tasty.

Not much known why this quartet, having laid down their first album in 2011, put it out three years later – without much noise, albeit with a new video. All the beautiful noise, as well as dirt, is in the music that ties the Southern rock idiom, so clear in “She’s A Devil,” to a whipping post and hits it hard. There’s an unbridled vivacity in the title track where the twin guitars of Francesco Manna and Mauro Eretta kick up Simone Piu’s frayed voice and punchy bass, a carrier of the “Soul Slow Train” ballad, while a church organ casts an additional spell onto “Voodoo Woman” which might be the most serious offering here, because for the most part the vibrant likes of “Louisiana Mojo Man” serve humor in spades.

One shouldn’t look further than the titles like “God Save Rock ‘n’ Roll” to get the gist, and catchy sway, of it, yet the acoustic interlude which is “Po Boy” shows the ensemble at their most swampy and contemplative. When “Father My Blood” picks up its riff the tension rises and the slam becomes murderous, but once the lava flows from “Hell Or Eden” redemption reigns, and roars, supreme. Retro jive? Maybe. But it’s a tar pit of joy nobody would want to crawl out of: it’s this classy.

****1/2

October 17, 2014

Category(s): Reviews
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