The Electric Mud - Burn the Ships

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Born of a grueling series of sessions in a hellish, un-airconditioned garage on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River…These are the first lines that you read from the biography of THE ELECTRIC MUD. For who is not comfortable with geography, this means Fort Myers, California. And together with this, you just need to listen to one or maybe two seconds of their second album called “Burn the ships” (the first one, “Bull gator” was released in 2018) to understand what they play.

TEM plays exactly the same music that I would expect to hear and listen to when I am entering a dusty, hot and dirty bar in the south of the US: a stoner rock, with a lot of blues and southern rock influences, played with a lot of sweat and passion. Do I like it? Honestly, I do not know. I think there is a big difference between what you would like to hear, so to say, live, and what you would like to listen on your hi-fi on a CD or MP3. So, let’s dig in it.

I had the opportunity also of listening to the previous “Bull gator” and I was not impressed: apart from some solid riffs, I found it quite boring and monotonous. So, how does this “Burn the ships” sound? I think there is a big improvement in the production and songwriting. I really love the opener “Call the Judge”: solid sound, rocky riffs, rough voice make of this song a rousing opener. In the following “Priestess” seems like the time stopped in the Seventies, with his dark feeling and hypnotic riffing. Quite a decent song, a little too long in my opinion (more than 7 minutes), which, as said in the opening, could be good when played live.

“Reptile” has an amazing instrumental central session (looks like a jam session), followed by an impressive acceleration, and a quite memorable chorus (although repetitive), but then towards the end the slow section release the pressure and waste all the good parts played until that moment.“Black wool” is way too long, again a 7 minutes song that will make not wait for its end. “Stone hands” has a heavy riffing but get lost in the chorus, as in the previous “Good monster”; both smells of déjà vu. The calm “Terrestrial birds” closes the album: I like here the acoustic guitar and the transition, as well as the final crescendo, but again the duration makes the song difficult to digest.

So, final words on this “Burn the ships”: big step forward from “Bull gator”, really solid performance, but, apart from a (really remarkable) couple of episodes, it is not memorable. On the other side, the energy that this album is releasing makes THE ELECTRIC MUD the perfect gig that I would like to see on stage, playing exactly this kind of music, with a hot temperature and a cold beer in my hands. I am confident that if they can leverage from the good things that I have heard of in this album (as said, “Call the Judge” is a hell of an opener), they will improve more and more. PS: great album cover!

Songwriting: 6
Originality: 6
Memorability: 6
Production: 8

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