Vida Blue feels like watching a baseball game in the ’70s with your alcoholic dad. You can hear the Oakland crowd go wild, and Dad’s drunken groans echo around the wood-slatted family room. You wince as he tightens his fists. You can hear your mom making beef stroganoff in the kitchen with the radio going, smell the weighty hamburger meat right before she adds the roux and a healthy helping of apathy. It’ll make your bones grow, she whispers when you ask. The fuck you say, your dad growls, crumpling the can of his eighth beer and throwing it at the trash can’s broken teeth. You try to watch the game and witness Dodgers hitter Van Joshua out by Rollie Fingers on a groundout to end the series. Oakland’s Swingin’ A’s in a threepeat, 4-1. Mom and Dad start throwing fists and divorce threats like there’s a World Series at stake, and you can’t tell if you should cheer for the A’s or feel sad for the Dodgers because your parents are fighting over beef stroganoff and growing boys.
Vida Blue, Mamaleek’s ninth full-length, mourns the 2023 death of member Eric Livingston – paralleled by the Oakland Athletics’ relocation to Las Vegas. It reflects on legendary pitcher and namesake Vida Blue’s legacy – and Livingston’s. In honor and homage, Vida Blue takes the squelching and jangling hemorrhaging cyst-blues template of 2022’s impressive Diner Coffee, painting a ’70’s folk-, blues-, prog- and jazz-rock sheen across it with reckless abandon. Bass lines are the backbone of each track, frequently shattered and crippled in flute or brass explosions; jazzy southern rock and metallic licks drool across the bandstand; abrasive noise and groaning post-punk drive their teeth into the proceedings. Ultimately, Vida Blue is everything that makes Mamaleek completely divisive – and utterly brilliant.
Vida Blue does a good job capitalizing upon Diner Coffee, unsteadying the Oxbow-esque blues-rock foundation and its avant-garde elements. It adds to Mamaleek’s freeform figure, enhanced by the brothers’ unhinged roars, agonizing groans, and disconcerting spoken word. From the opening lick of “Tegucigalpa,” a ZZ Top-esque guitar drawl colliding with the Jethro Tull’s soothing flute, it does its damnedest to draw you in with its plethora of avant-garde stylings only to pervert them into a cheese ball of rot. While the elevator music of “Vileness Slim” and the funky bass lines of “Vida Blue” and “Hatful of Rain” are cracked by brass and flute ejaculations, crescendos of discordant plonks and nostalgic chords seamlessly war in an undecided battle – elements like chimes, harmonica, backing choirs, noise, and even whistling adding to the trademark jangle. Big band orchestra a la Glenn Miller sprawl across tracks like “Vida Blue” and interlude “Momentary Laughter Concealed from My Eyes” add a tantalizing question mark in sudden yearning romance.
While Diner Coffee’s foundation of grotesque jazz lent itself to Miles Davis-esque moments of modal clarity, Vida Blue is much more fluid in its expressions, a grin of melody that shakes hands with the surrounding chaos – landmarks likewise including a tasteful dose that adds texture and nuance to the ugliness. “Ancient Souls, No Longer Sorrowful” features a droning southern rock line that fuses into infectious brass explosions before collapsing into a piano line that morphs from wildly improvised to suddenly beautiful, before returning to a Tom Waits-esque doo-wop bastardization. “Black Pudding Served at the Horn of the Altar” features an off-kilter post-metal rhythm that Isis would be proud of beneath a slowed pedal effect of Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of,” achieving a strangely liturgical aura through its ominous chanting. Finally, ten-minute behemoth “Legion of Bottom Deck Dealers” feels ironically the most traditional, Joy Division-esque moans harmonizing atop a strange fumbling of glitching metallic guitar riffs that swing between beautiful and discordant.
As always, Mamaleek features a lot to unpack – discordant, freeform, and downright painful at times. Vida Blue is its most glorious train wreck yet, collapsing upon the fucked up foundation laid by Diner Coffee. In ways that pay homage to their fallen bandmate and to the city that moved on without the A’s lefty pitcher, the act’s ninth offering feels simultaneously more maniacal, more exploratory – yet the jangling trademark works stunningly in its favor – and, dare I say, Mamaleek feels more human. But as the saying goes, as the sounds of both baseball and domestic discord fade, you’re left with only the memories.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: The Flenser
Websites: mamaleek.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/Mamaleek
Releases Worldwide: August 9th, 2024
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