MONDAY 14tht DECEMBER 2009
Times : 8pm
Tickets : £5 adv
FATHER MURPHY are an Italian trio comprised by Reverend Freddie Murphy (vocals, guitar), Chiara Lee (vocals, keyboards, percussions) and Vittorio Demarin (drums, viola, vocals). Born in Treviso, Northern Italy, from the ashes of Freddie’s several previous musical projects, Father Murphy with just one album and a plethora of ep’s and limited releases became one of the most mysterious and enigmatic musical entities coming out of Italy. If their first album Six Musicians getting unknown was still somewhat rooted in twisted psychedelic pop and sounded vaguely related to Os Mutantes and Italian psych pop masters Jennifer Gentle, the new record is a bold statement and a significant step ahead - out of every familiar musical genre and right into the darkness.
Recorded in a church between the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, And He told us to turn to the sun maybe was born like a rather weird attempt to a concept album about religion, but surely sounds like a collection of dark, foreboding songs that crawl and twist and hiss like that old biblical serpent. Think of Gnostic masses, kabbalistic chanting, chiming little bells, tinny Gregorian-like drones played on toy-keyboards and the subtle but inescapable influence of 70’s Italian horror rock acts like Jacula and you will have some of the ingredients that make Father Murphy’s music. Add a good deal of lunacy and enough humour to keep the gloom away (just because you cannot take yourself that seriously) and the album is here, in all its strangely beguiling simplicity. Song after song, from the initial semi-pop outburst of “We were colonists” to ascetic, almost medieval atmospheres of Go Sinister, the entire lp feels like a truly different, warped experience. And when the final, 10-minutes mastodon “In their graves” creeps in with all the agility of a primordial doom-metal beast slowly sucked in a prehistoric swamp, everything comes full circle: an uneasy, compelling, furiously heretic yet sandblasted in Catholicism little album that could come only out of Italy.
Detuned guitar plod, spaced out rhythmic thump, lots of deep shimmery ambience and FX drenched drifts, wavery falsetto crooning, warbly organs, and the occasional bursts of feral yowling, wow. Unhinged, fractured, freaky, passionate, super intense and awesome. In discussing Father Murphy, other reviewers have mentioned Robert Wyatt, This Heat, Samla Mamas Manna, we also hear plenty of Marc Ribot in the guitars, all angular and off kilter, there's also some mysterious female vocals that surface here and there, field recordings, crickets, birds, all beneath weepy mournful Morricone-ish twang, a sound both woozy and ominous, dreamy and dense, a glorious deathlike dirge, part Dirty Three, part fluttery forest folk, a little wheezy organ dirge pop, some slooooooowed down Blonde Redhead, like we said this is super hard to describe. but what we do know is we love it- Aquarius Records, san Francisco
Moody Italian art-rock trio Father Murphy conjures an uneasy state of paranoia. Strained screeching, jangly percussion, creepy crooning and carnival-ride organs—odd and fascinating scores for a gory Dario Argento home movie – TIMEOUT CHICAGO
www.aagoo.com
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