Review: Lay Llamas - Thuban

This is one album that I have been eagerly awaiting since it was first mooted ages ago. As regular readers will know, my love of the Italian 'scene' is deep and of the many bands that are currently wowing people, Lay Llamas are one that can lay claim to being a band that has pushed this scene to the front of peoples' minds. Their debut on Backwards Records back in 2012 was a masterful mix of tribal psychedelia, krautrock and mutated afrobeat...a masterpiece in anyone's book. They followed this with 'Østrø' on Rocket Recordings which exposed them to a bigger audience...throw into the mix a truly wonderful split tape with Tetuan on Artetetra and you have a band with an extremely strong back catalogue. This time around, however, it is a paired down band with Gioele Valenti leaving to follow his own destiny with the (equally) fantastic JuJu and so leaving Nicola Giunta to take the helm singlehandedly...and what a spectacularly fine job he has done! 'Thuban' ("named after the Arabic for ‘snake’ also known as Alpha Draconis, and sometimes as the ‘dragon’s tail’... was the star closest to the North pole from the fourth to the second millennium BC") sees Giunta team up with some musical heavyweights along the way - Clinic, Goat and Mark Stewart all appear and all make telling contributions to what is undoubtedly one of the albums of the year.

The album opens with the wonderfully titled "Eye-Chest People's Dance Ritual' and a simple but exotic melody before an irresistible drum and bass (not to be confused with 'drum'n'bass'!) rhythm takes things straight into head-nodding territory. Giunta's vocals, when they arrive, are understated but quietly effective and all is very groovy and dreamy. The drums reminded me a bit of The Stone Roses - that same funky drive and personality and as a whole, as good an opening track as you could hope to find. 'Holy Worms' is simply stunning - the funky afrobeat vibe almost dares you not to dance and the combination, with more of Giunta's understated vocals and some flashes of exotic instrumentation, is positively intoxicating. 'Silver Sun' opens with a computerised beat a la The Normal's 'Warm Leatherette' - robotic but nostalgic - and the track opens up into another 'feelgood' piece of music. That beat continues throughout the track - part motorik and part strident avantgarde - and is joined by some skronky saxophone and some spacey drones that haunt the background. 'Cults And Rites From The Black Cliff' sees things initially take a turn to the more experimental - eerie drones and muted, dissonant percussion as is so prevalent in the Italian Occult Psychedelia scene - but this just prepares things for some wonderful tribalesque drums and melancholy sax. Clinic collaborated on this track and it is easy to see their influence, the analogue vibe and experimental bent. The track is a lot darker than those that preceded, things have a foreboding 'noir' quality that is exacerbated by some wonderful saxophone, the tension only lifted right at the end by a jaunty acoustic guitar refrain. 'Altair' sees labelmates Goat lend a helping hand. Now, I'm not the world's biggest Goat fan and so was initially a tad suspicious at this pairing but I have to admit it works really well. The track has a definite primal aspect to it....tribalistic drums and exotic percussion...over which lay the female vocals and the whole thing has a joyous afrobeat vibe about it. The chantlike male vocals add to the shamanic quality while the guitar is almost tropicalia in sound. It sounds like a real mix on paper but it all comes together well to form something sunny that will bring a smile to the lips. 'Fight Fire With Fire' is a whole different beast - spoken word vocals from Mark Stewart (The Pop Group) add a stark dystopian feel to proceedings..a litany of failings of the human race that is fiercely effective. When the music kicks in, in the form of coruscating guitar and strident drums, it doesn't so much dilute the message as underline it in red. There is a funky quality about it that could belie the seriousness of the lyrics but Stewart's magisterial reading has a gravitas that is hard to ignore. This is a brilliant track that mixes a social consciousness with some first rate music and the result is jaw-dropping. 'Chronicles From The Fourth Planet' is another fantastic track...fuzzy, deep guitar chords and muted vocal hums sit over a languid tribal beat and it all sounds very Italian, it has that cinematic score quality that I dig so much. An acoustic guitar is added to the mix and the vocals are raised above a murmur and sit cheek by jowl with the flamenco/tropicalia guitar and it becomes yet another masterful track. The album is closed with 'Coffins On The Tree, A Black Brain On Our Way To Home', the longest track at over 7 minutes. The restful sound of waves lapping against a beach dissolves into something that sounds like Darth Vader having an asthma attack but it all settles down into another exotic trip. An oscillating drone sits just underneath some primal drums and tropical percussion and this, alongside Giunta's vocals, becomes something that verges on a trip-hop chillout track but thankfully the clever instrumentation and flashes of idiosyncratic rhythm building keep it all firmly on this side of riveting.

'Thuban' is brilliant...there are no other words that will succinctly sum up how I feel about this album. Giunta has more than handled the shift to being a 'one man band'..there is a sense of artistic freedom that runs through the album. That is not so say that Valenti was in anyway constrictive...indeed, there are parallels between 'Thuban' and Valenti's JuJu material - the same clever use of afrobeat influences and masterful mixing of styles and approaches. However, this is all about Giunta and Lay Llamas....I have no doubt that 'Thuban' will build on the success of 'Østrø' and win over a whole new tranch of fans and admirers...and deservedly so for this is one fantastic album. 'Thuban' is out on 15th June on Rocket Recordings and can be ordered from the label's Bandcamp page here (on limited black & orange swirl or black vinyl and CD formats) or at the Band's Bandcamp page here.