MAMALEEK - Diner Coffee

Fresh off the strong critical reception of “Come & See”, the mysterious Mamaleek, who apparently operate somewhere between San Francisco and Beirut and who, after starting out as a duo, have only in recent years settled into a five-piece lineup — finally appreciated live as well — press on undeterred with their musical journey, one in which metal, noise, blues-core, free-jazz debris and a willingness to take risks, even at the cost of alienating less adventurous ears, go hand in hand with a creeping sense of anguished unease.

“Diner Coffee” (an album that's probably unresolved, but still full of charm) tells of everyday life and its dramas through the lens of humor which, strange as it may seem, this time around also lets a bit of optimism shine through. Looking to acts like Residents and Primus, who, in their view, were able, precisely by leaning on humor, to “explore deeper forms of understanding and humanity”, Mamaleek open their eighth effort with a “Libations To Sacred Clowns” that, not by chance, fuses noise-industrial blasts with scattered laughter. Right after, “Boiler Room” brings everything back into that theatrical dimension which is another of the basic traits of their music, here grappling, without a break in continuity, with electric gusts, doom slowdowns, passages steeped in a barely concealed, fetid melancholy and plenty, plenty of malaise filtered through a gaze that is both self-satisfied and resigned.

The slow, solemn procession of “Badtimers” brings to mind a Pere Ubu particularly influenced by a noir-tinged strain of jazz-doom. There's an air of decay all around, and those little voices that hover like ghosts in the fade-out push the sickness of our times into the realm of dark joke.

For three and a half minutes, before giving way to a noisy crescendo of paranoia and trepidation, “Grief And A Headhunter's Rage” lingers in half-light, playing on the sense of threat generated when silence and sound are on the verge of swallowing each other whole. The most dissolute and freewheeling track, however, is “Wharf Rats In The Moonlight”, a visionary free-form reconnaissance into art-metal territory, chasing the possibility of rebirth amid the existential labyrinths of a war veteran on the brink of madness. The final stretch is covered with an anguished jam that hybridizes blues, desert mirages and a boundless sense of nostalgia — that feeling which seizes the mind and carries it back to where we were once happy or, at least, where we believed we were.

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14/11/2022