We are never really listening to music without some form of background framework. Absorbing The Myrrors new album, after a 6-year gap since the band’s last release, makes you think again of where that story had got to previously.
The band, centred in Tucson Arizona, under the influence of the Sonoran Desert, that stretches as far as California and Mexico, focus into a uniquely balanced form of droning rock. Over several albums, EP’s and live recordings, the band collected music into experiences that often felt like being part of a trance-like ceremony. Short three-minute tracks felt like edits of hour-long pieces, and side long tracks rolled by, like tasters of things that hung in the desert breeze for days…
The Myrrors always felt like they walked a fine line between their influences, and their own ideas whittled into something new. Imagine the entire Pärson Sound / International Harvester / Träd, Gräs och Stenar trajectory, dusted in other early 70’s kosmiche rock, Terry Riley and drone, all filtered and reconstituted into some present-day heat stroked mass…
A run of studio albums, particularly Arena Negra, Entranced Earth, Hasta La Victoria and Borderlands all released between 2015-18 play like some huge multi layered boxset. Everything growing from a familiar shimmering backdrop, occasionally aligning into peaks of thumping grooves, psychedelic vortices, and throbbing sunblind drones.
Whilst this music remained hugely enjoyable, after this solid run, it was fair to say that the band probably needed to recalibrate themselves. A period of silence, a global pandemic and a few solo projects slowly emerging. Centred around NR. Safi, the bands singer and guitarist, moved to Europe and released a series of mind popping spiky tape assemblages under the name Naujawanan Baldar. Drummer and multi-instrumentalist Grant Beyschau offered a superb album of zero gravity synth (Munds Spring), and a stunning, if overlooked kosmiche masterpiece Wooden Flower (as Tambourinen) and Zenith-Nadir, which neatly straddled both these extremes. Other mainstay Miguel Urbana, returning to provide the droning folky ballast on viola.
So, this new album Land Back, whilst recorded back in 2021, offers an insight into how these newer developments might have impacted on The Myrrors hive mind. The truth that whilst it broadly follows what you may expect, Land Back feeling like a step forward, here in two remarkable but distinct highlights.
After the brief introductory drone of Breakthrough, is the moment that first peak rises out of nothing. The title track Land Back literally explodes out of nowhere. A chant with more edges and insistence than we’ve ever heard the band offer before. It’s spiky, jarring, and uneasy but tied together with drums, drones, and flute that all lock into each other. Land Back, a protest chant highlighting colonial wrongs is spat rather than sung. It’s the song that’s probably the headline grabber but whilst it’s bold and new, it’s the most un-Myrrors track we’ve yet heard. That previously subtle politics half submerged in earlier work seems to have grown more angular, and understandably angry.
Snake Dancers In The Assembly Of Death sounds like how you may expect – a twisting slow pan through shadows and sand dunes. Baku A Bandung then stretches almost 9 minutes winding into an expanding thrashing groove crisscrossed in protest cries and roars…
However, the second peak of this album and our highlight – is the final and utterly remarkable 15-minutes of The Wretched Of The Earth.
Starting with a looping chant, a bed of droning organ as the whole thing slowly builds. At the point it seems to lock into forever, the floor falls away leaving a hanging nebula of guitar and viola. It’s like Träd, Gräs och Stenar jamming with jazzy King Crimson. Terry Riley’s time lag accumulator flutes, aligns in kaleidoscopic patterns. It’s Eno infused early Roxy Music, it’s like so many things, and unlike anything The Myrrors have ever done. Even as the whole thing intensifies, it never once puts a foot wrong. Tying itself in knots, it spouts layers of amazingness, that even as the track finally gently unpicks itself towards silence, each new wave of climb down still fizzes with new energy.
Somehow unexpectedly, The Wretched Of The Earth might just be the best track they’ve ever made.
When your feet do finally find the floor again, Land Back feels like a very welcome return – a concise 35-minute snapshot of them in various zones. An album that plays out like an adventure, twisting and turning, exotic and heady, an organic and deeply psychedelic reintroduction. An album that wastes no time, but leads you somewhere utterly spectacular.
Land Back is out 9th August, and available digitally, and one limited black and clear vinyl editions here
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