SAN LEO
SAN LEO “Aves Raras”
By Dr. Abner Mality
You won’t need mushrooms to trip out if you pick this up. This is one of the most psychedelic explosions of sound to come down the pike in a while and a real change of pace for me. SAN LEO is an Italian duo who have come up with a sound they call “mantra-core”...yes, I know, we need another “core” like a hole in the head. But at least this kind is genuinely different.
You can call it hard electronic dance music with a huge helping of guitar drone and psychedelic rock ladled on top. It’s made of layers on top of layers and those layers go so deep, it’s difficult to peel them all back. The result is something really LOUD and energetic with some occasional softer atmospheric notes added in. It’s about 90% instrumental, but choral voices can be found buried in that strata of layers. In no way is it metal, but parts of “Aries” and “Al-Ay” are deafeningly loud and the beats are very frenzied and energetic.
We get four tracks here. Two really huge jams and two smaller, more digestible tracks. All have things in common but are quite different from each other. For my money, the first monster track “Aries” is SAN LEO at its best. It starts with a ton of glitch and what sounds like music that’s been chopped up and played backwards. Then it just grows and grows from there like Jack’s beanstalk and breaks into heavy washes of electric guitar and synth. I just imagine this in some high tech disco with tons of painted drugged up people writhing amidst fog and laser light. It does have some quieter moments but overall, it’s an overwhelming sonic assault...imagine UFOMAMMUT combined with psy-trance electronics. It’s almost an album in itself.
“JiOy”, one of the shorter tunes, is fast and almost deliriously happy...this is the track where I detected some vocals popping in. The song would have been better without them but is still fun. “Futura 2000” is the next giant monster track and is more conventional spacey techno, coming across like an electro-dance injected HAWKWIND completed with swooshes and cosmic synth. Not bad, but it doesn’t match up with “Aries”. The album concludes with the short “Al-Ay”, which is so LOUD it almost busts your eardrums. HUGE chunks of guitar drone propel this one and it’s another song of many layers, sounding almost ecstatic. Ecstatic is a good word in general to describe the music of SAN LEO.
I was pretty intrigued with what these two Italians conjured here. Don’t think I could listen to it every day, but as an occasional break with typical metal, it’s quite refreshing.