by Conor Lochrie (@conornoconnor)
Melbourne quintet Spiritual Mafia boast members gathered from some of that city’s best underground outfits (Ausmuteants, EXEK). Together Alfresco is their debut album but it was a fractured journey to this point: after playing a few shows back in 2018, that their members were all based around the far reaches of Australia meant that recording was a troubling consideration.
It was, then, a hard-earned record. Spiritual Mafia’s music constantly arrives at a confluence. It’s a hybrid of murky garage and cocky proto punk; it’s dark English-indebted post punk delivered with an assured Australian accent; it’s swaggering and cocky, blunt and bloodied. Repetitive riffs never relent alongside motorik rhythms as the album starts building from the first note and seemingly never stops building after that.
There’s a primitive physicality to Spiritual Mafia’s music. There is rugged violence in the way the pulsating instrumentation never stops until it has subsumed the subconscious; it’s muscular and menacing and leaves one feeling submissive. The raw energy is almost animalistic, the proto punk prowling and stalking. Two songs (‘Hybrid Animals’ and ‘Bath Boy’) are wickedly long, as if the band are daring their listeners to look away, to find a less abrasive experience.
In the lyrics too, there is simple physicality. They discuss sustenance and acts of daily survival. So ‘Lunch’ opens the album discussing the pleasure of connecting with others over food (“We can dine alfresco”), belying the sinister nature of the rhythm. Lead singer Ben Mackie yelps and howls through songs with titles like ‘Body’ and ‘Hybrid Animal,’ the former about seceding ownership of one’s own body to some higher power.
The band’s name initially only intimates confusion but listening to Alfresco makes one notice a simple but well-meaning sense of philosophy and spirituality. ‘Smile’ is just about being happy in whatever form it comes in. ‘Bath Boy’ reflects on the bath as a safe place to relax and reflect on life’s biggest questions. It’s almost certainly delivered with a winking eye, tongue-in-cheek, but there’s an endearing humanism to it all.
Alfresco is not only a worthwhile debut release but it’s another strong addition to Anti-Fade’s roster which already boasts artists like Bananagun, Parsnip, and Alien Nosejob (it’s also being released by the New York label Ever/Never). Expect more from the band, if they can get all their members back together again in the future.