FUZZILIERS – Sail The Seven Seas
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Slava Lobanov seems to be quite the busy guy. Well known, in his native Saint Petersburg and currently residing in Istanbul, as a jazz, swing and Dixieland musician, he’s also one half of the duo Pereuchyot with Russian rapper Oxxxymiron, and a member of experimental progressive stoner doom band Juice Oh Yeah which I reviewed favourably a few years back. Due to political reasons, the band decided after the beginning of the Ukraine invasion to emigrate to Turkey, where they continued as Fuzziliers, playing a musical genre that you would hardly expect to come from Eastern Europe. Fuzziliers are heavily rooted in sixties psychedelic pop with a healthy dose of nineties Brit rock, and are unashamed to quote Oasis among their influences. After a short four track EP last year, the quartet is now back with their first longplayer Sail The Seven Seas, although the nine songs just hardly make it over half an hour, so hardly a long longplayer. And yet, these nine songs are brimming with so many ideas that you will be surprised how much can be stuffed in one short song. The opener and title track is the best example of this modus operandi. It is a heavily orchestrated song, not even four minutes long, but having so many different parts that it feels like a condensed psyche pop opera. The following Goodnight is the band paying tribute to Oasis, but in a charming way. The single This Is Love is at two and a half minutes the album’s shortest track and feels like the Kinks have left their traces. The album continues in that vein, juxtaposing the vivid Technicolor sound of the swinging sixties with mellow lightly stoned alt rock of more current times. At times this reminds me of MGMT on their glorious if severely overlooked album Congratulations, maybe also of psyche pop revivalists like Shy Nobleman. The songs on Sail The Seven Seas are more pop than rock, and get all their charm from the sophisticated arrangements and the varied instrumentation that show how much work must have gone into writing and recording this small but impressive debut album. Yes, we are living in dark times, but it is bands like Fuzziliers that are dropping the necessary blots of colour to make it all more bearable. |
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9 songs |
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30:52 minutes |
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***** **** |
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Genre: psychedelic pop (self-released) |
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