Have you ever wondered what the surface of a space object might look like? Well, take a look at the video to the track Future Lords by Seven That Spells and you might get a pretty good idea. There are razor sharp edges and slippery surfaces, the prevailing colours are black and grey, there is hardly any light. This other world you have just entered is definitely not life supporting.
Future Lords is one of the two main tracks on Seven That Spells’ new album Omega. If you are into real music, you should check it out. It doesn’t really matter what kind of music you usually listen to. The sound, as arranged, is new and innovative and therefore absolutely worth your time. It will have you marvel at the maths and the logic, the skill and the intellect involved.
The track starts out with eerie spherical tones that are quickly joined by tribal drums, then by a psychedelic quitar sound. By the time the vocals in Old Greek set in, you’ve already been won over. The chanting in combination with the tribal drums creates pictures of rituals and rites of passages, of tribespeople dancing
In Omega, the main track and masterpiece of the album, the wall of sound grips you almost from the very start and takes you off the planet and into space. It’s vast, and it’s cold there. You can feel the universe’s greatness and the danger from the fact that it is completely indifferent about mankind. The laws of physics rule, one thing leads to another, cause and effect, there is no emotion involved.
The sound is distinctly male, there is no playful, female element. The meditative repetitions will provide you with a structure and an anchor and prevent you from getting lost, something that often happens in drug-induced psychedelic concertos. Not here.
The best thing on the album is the excellent double vocal singing in Old Greek. I don’t know Old Greek, but to me it connects this new sound to a time and an age of human greatness and nobleness. It evokes the Greek gods and goddesses and the unsurpassed philosophers. And some antic philosophy will come in handy in this time and age that sometimes feels like a Greek tragedy heading straight to its catastrophic conclusion.
Seven That Spells are a band from Zagreb, Croatia, that has been active for about 15 years. They play psychedelic rock, krautrock, more or less. Omega is the third and final part of a trilogy named The death and resurrection of Krautrock. The album was developed through a transatlantic cooperation with the outstanding American drummer Blake Flemming (Laddio Bolocko, The Mars Volta), aided by the possibilities of new media.
For maximum effect I suggest you listen to the album somewhere outside, somewhere vast and barren, a landscape like the one on the space object in the video. What do we have those gadgets for, after all.
(9/10 Slavica)
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