As I've probably written before, I left Athens behind a decade ago to settle in The Netherlands. I used to follow the local scene very closely from the late 80's until the early 00's. Back then we learned about gigs from posters around Exarchia or flyers at our favourite bars. Bands gigged for years before they got a 7' single out, and later an LP or CD. No way would you browse the Greek Rock section at a record store and think "just who are these guys?" because you would have already seen them play live - if not supporting a foreign act at Rodon, then at the AN Club, or the indie free festival at Pedio Tou Areos or one of the anarchist's squats like Villa Amalias. At some point during the early 00's this seems to have changed: people began hearing about bands from facebook and watching them on youtube, while the next decade had even bigger changes in store: financial and political crisis, austerity and deep recession rocked the foundations of Greek society. Which, amazingly, didn't seem to hurt the local scene: maybe the monstrous (above 50% at the crisis' height) youth unemployement turned young people away from futile career hunts towards self-expression. The closing of big record shop chains and relative withdrawal of major labels left the field open to indie record shops and labels run by people motivated more by a passion for music rather than for profit. One of them is Inner Ear Records, which has released a great many albums by local indie bands in the last years. Based on the ones I've heard, it seems that the new scene is more open and genre-defying, experimental and introverted. Many many hours playing with recording software, I suspect, not so many playing in front of an audience. Look at this guy Prins Obi: apparently he's got 3 solo albums out plus 5 more as a member of Baby Guru, but in all my visits to Greece I never caught a whiff of them playing anywhere. Or maybe he did, and I just wasn't paying attention?
His new band Dream Warriors gathers musicians from different groups including Chickn who I presented some months ago in this blog. Their music falls broadly under the neo-psychedelic category, though it's by no means the usual Nuggets-style 60's revival stuff (nothing wrong with that, of course!). Side 1 is closer to, say, Ty Segall in its eclectic incorporation of elements from psychedelia, punk and glam. "Concentration" for example reminds me of Iggy Pop circa '77, "Fingers" of Marc Bolan, while "Flower Child (Reprise)" and "Astral Lady Blues" are heavier (think Monster Magnet albeit without the superhuman testosterone levels). "Negative People" similarly starts as heavy drone music, but surprises you with a Greek chorus (by which I mean a song chorus sung in Greek, not a tragedy troupe) right out of the country's cult 70's hippie past (i.e. Nostradamos, Poll etc). They continue to explore this hitherto uncool direction on side 2 with two more Greek songs ("Δίνη" [Vortex] and "Αδαμάντινα Φτερά" [Diamond Wings]). This side is generally lighter and more whimsical, reminiscent of 60's UK pop psych - e.g. in "Sally Jupinero" I hear traces of Nirvana - not Kurt Cobain's band of course, but the one with Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos. "Guilty Pleasure Theme" made me happy by echoing Greece's topmost (90's) psych heroes Purple Overdose with its organ and swirling Eastern melodies, while the closing "Wide Open" is a simple -for once- piano melody. A very pleasant record despite the jumble of influences, it compares favorably to any neo-psychedelic album produced in this decade. It may be a tad too smart for it's own good though, so I'll give it 3* for now and reserve another* until I see how it all translates in a live setting. You can listen to the whole album or buy it here.
**** for Flower Child (Reprise), Δίνη, Guilty Pleasure Theme
*** for Concentration, Negative People / Άμοιρε Άνθρωπε, Astral Lady Blues, Fingers, Αδαμάντινα Φτερά, Sally Jupinero, For Absent Friend, Wide Open
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