Florence outfit MEIFU, Mari (vocals); Tommy (guitar); Genia (bass/backing vocals) and Edoardo (drums/backing vocals) have been doing their thing since 2019 and have in their time together shared stages with notable Italian bands like Messa and Carrito, doing this while also plying their trade in other bands such as Lord Elephant, Dragnet, Vij and Sorelle Trapasso. In 2022 MEIFU released the appropriately titled "Demo 2022" a release that featured three very good and quite epic songs that sat squarely in the canon of atmospheric doom, although the demo did not really reach as many ears as the band might have liked it to it did show, to those that heard it, that this was a band with a lot of potential. In 2023 the band went into the studio to record a full album, that album has now been released via Argonauta Records, we at Desert Psychlist like it a lot and we think you will too.
"Haunted Dreams" opens with "Cubensis" an instrumental that boasts slightly dissonant off-kilter guitar motifs supported by grizzled and fuzzy bass and solid tight drumming, the song swells in both power and volume until it reaches a point where you think it cannot possibly go any further and then it does and the place it goes is straight into next song "Third Eye Invocation". Here we get our first taste of Mari's vocals on this album her vocals, an instrument in their own right, are part ethereal and fey part witchy and gritty her voice punching through the miasma of doom Tommy, Genia and Edoardo lay around her like sunshine through a dungeon window, even reverting to wordless banshee like wails in the songs later passages. "Turkish Kraken" follows, a song possessing a dynamic that is constantly switching between low and slow and mid tempo while utilizing middle eastern motifs and themes in both its guitar work and its vocals with Mari's vocals a mixture of witcihiness and spirituality and Tommy's guitar tones spiralling and exotic. Next up is "Steerpike", the song starts life hazy and slightly lysergic with its lyrics imparted in semi-spoken tones but then gradually builds layer by layer with those vocals taking on a much more strident and tuneful dynamic, the songs groove still in possession of a hazy and lysergic undercurrent but thanks to Genia's gritty bass lines and Edoardo's thunderous drumming becoming much more doomic and in your face as things progress. A basement level bass riff anchors next song "Battle of Chapultepec" supported by busy drum patterns over which reverberating doomic guitar crunchiness is applied with a considerably heavy touch, vocals here are again dominated by Mari but she gets some help along the way thanks to Genia and Edoardo who accompany her distinctive tones with some sludge like vocal harshness. Final number "So Magic" sees the band experimenting with elements of psych and space to great effect, ringing guitar motifs, bone shaking bass lines and tribalistic drumming framing a soaring vocal that again carries an air of dark spirituality in its delivery.
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