Savona, Italy-based psychedelic fuzz rock unit BLACK ELEPHANT today unveils their animated video for “Yayoi Kusama.” Now playing at BrooklynVegan, the track, which pays tribute to the Japanese contemporary artist for which it’s named, comes by way of the band’s Seven Swords full-length, released last Summer via Small Stone Record.
Notes guitarist/vocalist Alessio Caravelli “The video has been realized by the graphic designer Anna Ivaldi; it is dedicated to the biggest visionary artist of our time: Yayoi Kusama. Her art is like music for us. Anna did a great job with the video; you can feel our music travelling and diffusing through Yayoi’s eyes. We chose to honor Yayoi because of the song meaning: it is ideally addressed to everyone who still has the courage and perseverance to keep their ideas alive, without being conditioned by ‘third thoughts.’ I would say that BLACK ELEPHANT are like Yayoi: we started with this trip and it is still alive.”
View BLACK ELEPHANT’s “Yayoi Kusama,” at BrooklynVegan HERE.
Recorded and mixed by Giulio Farinelli at Green Fog Studio in Genoa, mastered by Farinelli at Everybody On The Shore Studio in Milan, Italy, and mastered by Chris Goosman at Baseline Audio Labs in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Seven Swords delivers an addictive assortment of classic-minded, heavy rocking tunes, picking the best the ’70s, ’90s, and ’00s had to offer in riffery and melding spacey blowouts with desert-hued hooks.
Seven Swords is out now on CD and digitally via Small Stone as well as limited edition vinyl via Kozmik Artifactz. For orders, visit the Small Stone Bandcamp page at THIS LOCATION.
Whether it’s the scorching leads of “Yayoi Kusama” or the conscious wink-and-nod of “Red Sun And Blues Sun” a short time later — just ahead of the bluesy “Seppuku” and the near-nine-minute stretch of closer “Govinda” — BLACK ELEPHANT brings their finest work to-date in an efficient seven-track, thirty-three-minute stretch, building not only on what they accomplished on Cosmic Blues, but also what their prior two full-lengths — 2014’s Bifolchi Inside and 2012’s Spaghetti Cowboys — were building toward. This is a band coming into their own, wasting neither their time nor yours in the process. Fuzz pedals preach on, the sky cracks, and the riffs themselves seem to lock bellies in sumo battles, so what the hell? The world’s ending anyway. You might as well have some fun with it.
“You want fuzz? BLACK ELEPHANT stomp their pedalboards like their namesake pachyderm. These Italian riffmeisters also engage in some serious amplifier abuse, but it’s all in the name of kick-ass heavy psych-blues jams. This desert rock comes courtesy of Sergio Leone’s widescreen viewfinder, capturing the vista in full technicolor glory.” – MetalSucks
“Deep heavy fuzz screaming from the deep purple blackness of space. I close my eyes and let it take me away into glints of the deep empty of impossible dreams of alien planets and new visions of color. Seven Swords can only be described as a sonic induced acid trip into the warm loving void of cold. Gleaming stars smiling at your wonderment as you float adrift in the rings of planets. Pulsars thumping, pressing you further through the Universe. Quasars rushing past you in furious cascades of color and light. This is the musical tone of Seven Swords.” — Sleeping Village Reviews
“When the fuzz hits, it lands heavy…” – The Obelisk
“BLACK ELEPHANT’s Akira Kurosawa-influenced release, Seven Swords, does not disappoint… From the sleek cover art through the excellent guitar tone and all the way to the kick ass compositional groove, Seven Swords is everything you need to beat that summer bummer.” – Heavy Blog Is Heavy
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