I’ve never been the type to have a single favorite artist (I’ve probably got 100, depending on the context or mood), but for more than a decade I’ve counted Italian psychedelic-metal group Ufomammut among the best bands on the planet. So in January 2020, when they announced that their drummer, Vito, was departing and that the other members were taking a break after 20 years together, I hoped their hiatus wouldn’t turn permanent. In the years since, we’ve experienced so much loss, but Ufomammut have thankfully not become a casualty of the time; their new album is titled Fenice (“Phoenix”), and they’ve emerged from their own ashes with a renewed sense of purpose and spirit. They’ve long been known for pushing the boundaries of heavy psychedelic music and building dense, titanium-strength walls of sound replete with far-reaching cosmic experiments and cavern-scraping doom, and their philosophical underpinnings have seemed to grow more ambitious from album to album. But as they note in the press release for Fenice, all those complexities began to take their toll. And so, joined by new drummer Levre, they decided to shake off the past and get back to basics. A listen to the album suggests they’ve accomplished their mission. Fenice twists and turns but never loses momentum or focus, and its relatively stripped-down atmospheres suggest that Ufomammut have burned off their music’s impurities (well, most of them) while preserving the white-hot essence. Written as a single track and divided into six pieces, Fenice is best experienced in its entirety. Between the church bells, whispers, and flying-saucer-invasion synths of opener “Duat”; the stunning, serene melodies that contrast with increasingly thunderous bass on “Metamorphoenix”; and the grimy, pulverizing grooves of “Empyros,” each song can more than stand on its own, but when you’re offered a journey as heady as this one, you want to make it last as long as possible.
Ufomammut’s Fenice is available through Bandcamp.
