After releasing their demo in 2022, the Barcelona-based Psychedelic Doom band Meltem released their first full-length on June 28: a blend of monolithic distortion, psychedelic riff and ritual drums from lands across the sea. Let’s dive into this review of Mare Nostrum by Meltem.
When you approach a Doom record you never know what to expect; the only thing that you know is arriving, is a slow and heavy riff and you should be prepared for that. When you take a look to the cover art you can guess something, but when you press play everything becomes clear.
The three-piece band from Barcelona published a full-length with four tracks that takes you on a journey on the Mare Nostrum, as the ancient Romans used to call the Mediterranean Sea. Listening to the album you can feel all the cultures that lived and live all across the Mediterranean Sea, comparing its glorious past, full of exchanges of knowledge an its present, full of hope and death.
The first track of the album is “Tretze”, that welcomes you with a slow monolithic fuzzed riff. Going through the track, the voice as a mantra of Pep Carabante (Drums, Darbouka, Vocals) completes the massive wall of sound, singing in Catalan about a battle viewed from the eyes of a person that will be caught as a slave. As the song progress, we are brought through the stages of this battle, until its ending.
When we approach the second track, “Cúrcuna”, we can notice that we are near our first stop on the North African coast. The darbouka provides the tempo and the clean guitar introduces a mystical region. The slow crescendo constructs images of distant lands, causing you to expect something that you don’t know when and how it will arrive. As on the sea, a storm can appear anytime, and so the distorted guitar comes like a bad omen. Daniel Carabante (Guitars, Effects) and David Giménez (Bass, Guitars) play riffs that speed up and slow down as gusts of wind on the sea. And as it started, the wind goes down and brings you to the calm after the storm.
“Mandragòra” starts with Pep’s addictive drum beat. The third track of the LP is the longest one, and is the other track with lyrics, this time in Spanish. This song starts right away to engage the listener in another voyage through a more dangerous place; Mandragora is the well known venomous and anthropomorphic plant that people have attached a mystical meaning and supernatural powers to in past times. During the 14’45 minutes of the song, we find ourselves in a more mystical place where the lyrics and the solo breaks through the massive wall of sound of the beginning.
The last track brings us in an apparently quiet but also mysterious place. “Oasi” starts with a darbouka rhythm played by the guest musician Omar Kattan, who adds one more stop on our journey. Middle-eastern scales, reverbs and effects add more mystery and lets the listener relax and sits down after the storm we’ve passed through.
The album is well produced and, undoubtedly, Meltem have done a great job to catch our attention throughout the long tracks. Their ability to reproduce the phases of a storm in their music manages to keep the listener always attentive to what is happening, waiting to find out what will come next. Like the Mediterranean history, this record accompanies the listeners to periods of immense beauty and immense cruelty, both things that our ancestors experienced and which we are experiencing now.
