Stiff Buscemi - Jet-Black Highdooks

 

 

Stiff Buscemi - Jet-Black Highdooks
Inverted Spectrum Records – 2025
Psychedelic Rock, Heavy Psych, World Music
Rated: ****1/2

About 25 years ago, whenever a local rock band in the Eindhoven area was talking too much between songs at a concert, an amicable "speuluh kut!" ("start playing you cunts!") welled up from the crowd, indicating it was time to get going again. That's something Serbian psychedelic rockers Stiff Buscemi won't be experiencing anytime soon. Words aren't high up on their list of priorities when instruments are within reach. Quite the contrary - this is instrumental psychedelic rock in all its wonderful glory.

Opener 'Кљун' immediately draws you in with a Middle Eastern melody set over a sturdy, hypnotic rhythm that propels you straight to a small village made of sandstone in the middle of the desert, local stray dogs gathered around a small oasis, the wind softly caressing your skin and the shadows of palm trees providing a relatively cool spot to make the blistering heat more bearable. It's exemplary for Stiff Buscemi's sound that interweaves tapestries of (heavy) psych with Middle Eastern, African and Balkan music, ranging from a gritty, fuzzy escapade like 'Крлино Коло' to the short, atmospheric 'Iguana' while the title track 'Jet-Black Highdooks' rests somewhere in the middle. The latter slowly ascends from mellow to semi-rocking with a tension that predicts an explosion at some point in time. Will it happen? That's the main question for you to find out while listening to this album. What I can tell beforehand is that 'Jet-Black Highdooks' is thirty minutes of pure pleasure. An organic mix of styles that is at the exact same time a fuzz-drenched piece of psych and a relaxed breather, bound to set the world on fire in the right way: not by throwing bombs or using aggression, but by showing how unity and connection can be created through music - that universal glue that doesn't need words to act as the language of love.

(Written by Ronny Dijksterhuis)

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