Who You Calling Scruffy Lookin'?
Zolle's self titled disc is a ten tonne arse shaker of dirty riffs and elephantine beats. Zolle is another release from the Ufomammut crowd via their Supernatural Cat label that's run in conjunction with the Malleus Rock Art Lab - the provider of psychedelic visuals for countless gigs and albums - and features Marcello of Morkobot on six string duties and Stefano pummeling defenceless drums into submission.
Broadly speaking this is stoner rock, the kind that previous genre leaders Queens of the Stone Age have seemingly evolved beyond but that countless metalheads still crave. It could also be termed space rock but not the dreamy cosmic kind. Oh no, this is the full on, balls to the wall sort - more like the soundtrack to the battering of the Millennium Falcon with a hydrospanner. It's unkempt blue collar instrumental heavy rock for impoverished spice smugglers not bridge of the Enterprise intellectuals.
Trakthor is the suitably robotic meat-cleaving opening track that cues up oodles of syncopated riffing and concise but action packed song structures. The unrelenting blasts of heavy metal continue until the song titled in homage to the genre and, of course, punned with the Italian for manure: Heavy Letam with its rotating guitar stabs and Doctor Who synths courtesy of Ufomammut's Urlo and Roberto Rizzo of Quasiviri/Runi who also return to contribute to the woozy finale and wonderfully titled Moongitruce.
It all sounds like the result of a night spend ingesting the Arrakis spice from Dune and committing the stomping, heavy breathing instrumental effect to tape. It's heavy but not leaden - the tracks rarely stray above three minutes in length and there are few fripperies (including guitar solos), instead drums and guitar rub against each other in a hedonistic brew of headbanging reverie.
If the Millennium Falcon had an 'I Hate Disco' bumper sticker and if Chewie and Han spent their time cruising the galaxy for good times rather than helping with the Rebellion, Zolle would be on the tape deck. Zolle is an album to get loaded to and forget about doing the 'right' thing, well for at least 27 minutes and then you hit play again.