Mother Island - Motel Rooms

Mother Island are back with more growling psychedelica in their upcoming third album: Motel Rooms released on Go Down Records. The band, who hail from Vincenza in Italy, bring the spaghetti western back with an album that fuses the nostalgia of Moriconi - inspired cinema with the experimental side of the west coast in wild psychedelia. On the band’s Bandcamp page, they describe themselves as a ‘surreal, whimsical and lunatic space’ ‘ A Magic Theatre, For Madmen Only’. In Motel Rooms, they certainly create this space, a space where dangerous creatures roam free, a space that pays homage to the deserts of the west. 

The album’s first three tracks, ‘Till the Morning Comes’, ‘ Eyes of Shadows, and ‘And We’re Shining’ send you straight to the dark wilderness of the desert  through the twangy, rumbling of guitars, synonymous with the likes of Link Wray, Duan Eddy, and Bo Diddley. The opener with its aggressive guitar licks replicates a rattlesnake attack, merciless and calculating, and all the while, slightly arousing. ‘ And We’re Shining’ is layered with thunderous drum rolls that set a more energetic mojo compared with pure jangly guitars. If anything, it goes beyond the groove of the jangly guitars and makes the track more danceable. If any track epitomizes the spaghetti western on this album, it is ‘We all Seem to Fall to Pieces Alone’. The title alone evokes the lonely lonesome cowboy effect, of someone torn by the memories of the past. But the horn section is the defining moment on this number, taking you straight to a scene from a spaghetti western, roaming the desert all alone with nowhere for miles.     .