The Myrrors - Fuzz Club Live Session

The deserts around Tucson, Arizona have a loneliness filled only by the sounds that periodically interpose the crypt-quiet environs. The eerie howling, the screeching, shambling and other maddening sounds made by the life-forms that call it home. That we call the landscapes romantic and evocative is because of the barrenness, and the way the colours transform shapes and the horizon. However, to be in the desert alone and unequipped, would be to inevitably fall to its cruel and indiscriminate fate. The Devil’s solarium.

That music can approximate the awesome power of this geology is a wonder in itself. The Myrrors have lived and breathed these lands from safe junction no doubt, but in their music, they embody the spirit of the place, as if an extension of their own creative spirit.

Make no bones, this is a magnificent live release and offers a tantalising glimpse of what the album Borderlands will be like when released shortly. ‘Juanito Laguna’ was first released on the album, Arena Negra, but here on the double-timed live version it slow burns, and embraces sounds as strikingly eerie as the ones you’d hear in the parched and dusty Redlands. Part Morricone/Hermann and part orchestral post-rock, the strings at first chill, and then ache, like life being sapped from a sentient being. The woodwinds spiral around like detached vegetation swaying violently back and forth, carried by turbulence. The strings gain volume and the woodwinds become more sparing, buzzing erratically like unwelcome insects. ‘Juanito Laguna’ reaches a crescendo evoking a feeling of reverence mixed with fear, before trailing off like a flash storm speeding quickly across windswept skies.

‘Semillas Sembradas’ once appeared as a fanzine single, and I haven’t heard the original. Here it sounds like the desert as an extension of the human spirit, channeling as it seems the native voices that are locked irrevocably into the history of this land. Another brilliant composition, again here played live and having a pronounced impact upon this listener because of the immediacy of the sound.

Which brings us to ‘Notes From The Underground’ which will appear on the new album. A drone piece part eastern psychedelia, and modeled on the novella by Dostoevsky of the same name, a work of cynical existentialism, where the protagonist is mindful of the need for social resistance but is overcome by ennui. One might evince that The Myrrors are drawing parallels with modern society’s inability to act upon its collective disenchantment, as the rise of populism and fascism in world politics shows no abatement, but for our purposes their energies are expended in producing a mind-melting piece of music that easily displaces any psych derivative I’ve heard this year.

Essential.