When this CD arrived in my pile, I was immediately intrigued. It just goes to show what a strong band name and a high-impact title can do. I didn’t have time to play it there and then, but straight away, I began wondering what an album with a title like ‘Death Surf’, as produced by an act called Heroin in Tahiti might sound like.
On hearing the album, I discovered that it sounded exactly the way I’d anticipated. Shimmering heat-haze drones drift over barren, sun-parched desert wastelands. Guitars twang in the distance, the sound decayed, corroded, melted and caked in blown dust. Think ‘Death valley’ surf, the Italian duo’s love of the spaghetti Western Morricone soundtrack filtered through a disorientated drug-induced gauze. The textures are gritty, the arrangements sparse, drawn out and spaced out.
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The band describe ‘Death Surf’ as ‘an hypothetical soundtrack to an old mondo movie gone wrong’, and as a blood-spattered tumbleweed drifts by, one imagines discovering the corpse of the one horse town’s horse lying by the side of the road. A spaghetti wasteland indeed. It’s the sound of paranoia, fatigue and isolation. It’s barren, twisted, fucked up and seriously cool.
Heroin in Tahiti Online
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