Fatima - Turkish Delights (New Full Album) This is some extremely fuzzy stoner doom. This French band just released 'Turkish Delights', eight tracks of psychedelic fuzz and doom. Some excellent stuff in this, a blast to listen to. Their new album ?Turkish Delights? was released April 10th and is occult rock of the highest order. A band with so many influences in their sound, you can hear grunge and psych, punk and doom and there are few bands that succeed in getting such a varied sound. Tune in now.
For those who think that grunge died in the last century and is no longer their concern, trust it to a power trio to make it clear that there?s life in the downcast beast yet. Generally the remit of the vocals and rolling patter of the drums, moments of ?90s nostalgia come into bloom through drawling choruses and blurry riffing, distortion dragged through the mud like trailing jeans unravelling into frayed tails. No idiotic feedback odysseys adjoin these moments of pure nirvana, however; a bucking, overdriven bass keeps the songs concise and meaningful even with the sticky potential of peeling off into a Turkish jam, during which the Eastern tendencies perfume the air with tangy sharp strings and wafting melodies. So, that?s your grunge and stoner bits, which are more or less what keep Turkish Delights in rock territories, though the heft of a few riffs in 'Hyena' and the bass-heavy 'Toy Poodle' pushes the sound towards doom as well.
Fatima spares us from the usual straight-faced tendencies of their chosen genres by imbuing the whole record with a lithe sense of energy, powering through 35 minutes as if it?s nothing. The samples also weigh heavily in the equation. Starting 'Saliva Bath' with the snappy line ?Ah, little sweet one with your heart of gold, I know the place where we can be alone to join our souls in sacred truth? makes one look rather differently at its thick grooves and gritty high-range vocals, while the eerie slower mid-section and crushingly heavy ending call to mind Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard due to the haunting electronics in the background. Equally, the sarcastic repetition of ?a complete and hopeless nerd? proves a witty foil for the propulsive stoner grunge of 'Concubines of Salem'. It definitely helps that the whole song sounds like a distantly remembered chorus from 1993.
In essence, the kookiness of Turkish Delights becomes its greatest joy, since Fatima?s presentation of these 8 cuts revels in digressions and references that linger for a moment and then disappear. The album comes to revolve around the excellent 'Gooey Syrup', coming on like The Cure circa Faith and adding the twangs of Eastern strings to propel a foundational quiet/loud dynamic, culminating in a chorus that you?ll sing without knowing the words and a lead section that you?ll scream along to without knowing where it?s going. The whole experience rises and falls like mid-period Deftones albums, not because Fatima sound similar but because aggression and hooks are flipped round and become an enticing journey of uncertainty. Fatima play weird, anonymous, hip-shaking stoner grunge doom jams, but the French trio?s inventiveness and attitude are totally endearing.
