Next stop: The Birthday Party. What the anonymous masters of Avantgarde-Everything Mamaleek are doing on their latest record Vida Blue signifies a development which might only lead to the assumption that Mamaleek is the re-incarnation of Cave’s first significant band!
The fellows surely know how to keep themselves interesting – no real information ever gets outside, apart from the sorrowful loss of former bandmate Eric Allan Livingston in early 2023. Although the band self-proclaimedly started as a two-piece formed by brothers with roots in San Francisco and Beirut, Lebanon, one can never really know but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.
Doubtless are their capabilities and they shine ever so brightly on Vida Blue, their ninth record, which seems to be overshadowed with loss, even though at first glance a loss of a different kind. One of the key-lines in the title track is surely ”Las Vegas is called, and I’m not answering, count me out of the forsaken Glitter Gulch” and here it shows: The baseball aficionados are mourning the loss of their baseball team, the Oakland Athletics who will be moving to Las Vegas in the near future (aka when the stadium there is ready) marking the second time within a few years when the City of overflowing Cockiness is luring an Oakland team into their desert(ed) arms after the Raiders moved into Allegiant Stadium. Somehow this shows a kind of a traditionalism one might not have expected from a band like Mamaleek whose music is ever so forward-thinking. But isn’t that one of the essential things about being human – the ability to have many different facets and sometimes in one part of our existence uphold values we do not care about in other parts? One can be traditionalist about Baseball and not care about traditions when thinking about music! No contradiction but rather multi-level human existence. Furthermore, we all would not like one of our favorite pastimes being taken away from us by some greedy business suits, would we?
And to deepen this idea of a multi-level-approach when talking about traditions: Mamaleek still do not care about musical norms and audio conformity. Here the fourth track called ”Ancient Souls, No Longer Sorrowful” might be a prime example: Constructed around a powerfully dragging beat that is a steadfast base throughout the first part of the track, the band unfolds not one “genre” in its course but several: They share their love for oriental soundscapes at the beginnings, then go through that nearly funky section where only the growling vocals (are they using a vocoder here?) show some non-disco-idea, just before that twangy Surf-Rock riff kicks in and some glitchy electronic noises in the background shove the track into the next direction. That some of these elements are repeated and still changed throughout the nearly eight minutes should not be noteworthy as this is something where Mamaleek really serve their true audience’s expectations of not serving any expectations. When the track collapses around its own mid-riff, one gets some country-like harmonica in the background, some glitchy noises and a slow descent on the guitar before a few seconds of early 8bit electronica give us a bit of a breather until the mournful piano takes over and transports the track to a whole different field (maybe one in Iowa?!) where the guys lament something with such an unclear intensity that we can identify this loss as our individual loss, which is accompanied by some strings and the fact that the last minute sounds like some experiment on the piano is surely not a recording accident. This whole paragraph is now only about one track and we could write compendiums about the whole record but that would not be a good idea because this is what one person hears – everyone out there might have a totally different experience and that, again, is just human nature and behavior. We listen to something and apply our individual background onto this musical canvas and by doing so, we turn the picture into our very own one – each being a unique element.
This review could now be over, but we still have to clue up that Birthday Party reference from the beginning right? Well, listen to a track like ”Black Pudding Served at the Horn of the Altar”, and you will have the first reason for my idea. Nevertheless, there is something else behind it: It’s not only the crooning vocal parts of the record, it’s also in its destructive opulence, its manic idea of never staying to long in one place. Or the hollow hick-ups inserted into some of the tracks; maybe an inner wish not to do something twice. The sometimes obvious references to Rock’n’Roll schemes which are then destroyed next second. This attitude is something that was revived by Nick Cave and his fellow bandmates some 40+ years ago. Within that time there has hardly been a band that followed that caveat, that strife, wish with more urgency, more fervor, depth than Mamaleek.
