UFOMAMMUT – Ecate

There are different kinds of bands in the world, good ones, phenomenal ones, and those that belong in a different league altogether, reaching peaks that remain unattainable for most. I believe Ufomammut have always been among the phenomenal, thanks to their constantly high-achieving works, great ideas in composition, and an unequalled sonic atmosphere. Nevertheless, the groundbreaker for the story at hand was named after the deity of the three worlds (the living, the gods, and the dead): Ecate. She comes to the listener's aid in adventuring through this musical journey between psychedelia and pounding sludge, between ritualistic atmospheres and distorted abysmal swamps.

Our journey begins with an elegant electronic pattern, though it is nothing but an apparent calm; the bass violently thrusts in, between the humongous mammoth's steps, paving the way to the guitar. The six-stringed instrument is as colossal as it could be, outlining huge and vaguely uneven riffs, a mid-tempo that vanishes in the slow whirlwird of distortions; it takes the listener to the more hallucinogenic shores of "Somnium", where the veil of synthetizers and samples never goes away. This veil does not disappear in "Plouton", a textbook rendition of well-conceived sludge metal, a high density sonic mixture. As we can see straight from the start, "Ecate" is at the same time more complex and more straightforwardly homogeneous than its predecessors, the band's different musical souls perfectly amalgamate with one another; last but not least, the vocals are here probably more convincing than ever before.

"Chaosecret" would probably deserve a review of its own: perhaps the perfect manifesto of everything this trio from Piedmont has put together over a long career. Ufomammut's music here becomes more ancestral, an ancient ritual in which Urlo's voice emerges from a distance among echoes and feedbacks; Poia's guitar explodes in juxtaposition over the second half of this track building up to a memorable finale, a colossal binary pattern that erases fifty thousand years of history of music. We would probably need a few geologic eras in order to recover from this overwhelming rush of distortions, but the humongous creature wants to make sure that there are no survivors. "Temple" opens with an astonishingly beatiful riff, monumental, then going on to evolve between Pink Floyd and Electric Wizard; the extremely useful "Revelation" follows up with its four minutes of cosmic electronica, necessary for us to survive the final assault. "Daemons" doesn't add anything to what has already been said, but it works as an amazing union of alienating sounds and elephantine riffing accompanied by Urlo's voice — at times just scarcely perceivable beyond the towering walls erected by the stringed instruments. Just as it started, the experience ends with synthetizers and electronica from outer space.

In my humble opinion, "Ecate" signals the ultimate leap for the band from Tortona to music's Olympus, giving full meaning to the monicker Ufomammut: Cosmos and Earth; psychedelia and rawness. Album of the year, perhaps of the decade, maybe even more. For sure Earth hadn't witnessed anything this gigantic since Pleistocene.