Few instrumental bands carry a sense of quiet insistence like Basaltic Plateau. Their debut LP, Dead Dinosaurs Echoes, doesn’t announce itself loudly. Instead, it unfolds slowly, unevenly, with the weight of something long-shaped beneath the surface.
The trio’s history is tangled. Marco and Maurizio had played together years ago in Le Mal Noir, a university band that never recorded. Roberto arrived later, bringing the steady force of Bologna’s early-2000s underground. Those pasts press into the music. You feel it not as an explanation, but in the way the tracks shift, pause, and rebuild.
Maurizio’s guitars alternate between molten roars and jagged, scraping lines. Synths drift through the mix, cold, precise, almost brittle at times. Marco’s bass moves underneath everything, solid yet flexible, sometimes dragging, sometimes snapping into unexpected rhythms and tempo changes. Roberto’s drumming is insistent but unpredictable. He pulses, halts, rolls forward, then shatters the pattern briefly. Together, they create something more like a landscape than a conventional album: uneven, alive, and layered.
The sense of place is immediate. Sardinia’s beaches, dunes, and cliffs seem to inhabit every track. Sunlight, salt, wind, and shadow – all are implied in the music. The title hints at loss and memory. Dead dinosaurs emerge in the sound like sediment layers or fossilized echoes, reminders of what has vanished beneath human activity and time.
Genre markers are present but reframed. Stoner rock, psychedelia, noise – they appear, but only as raw materials. Motifs stretch, collapse, and fold back into each other. There are no predictable climaxes or tidy resolutions. Instead, the record moves with its own internal logic, at times slow and patient, at others abrasive or urgent.
The album’s temporal sense is layered. Past and present collide in the instrumentation. Guitars sometimes erupt like volcanic stone under pressure. Bass and drums grind steadily, almost tectonic. Synth lines hover above, sometimes sharp, sometimes distant, like glimpses of stars seen through heat haze. The music resists being pinned down; it shifts, scrapes, settles, and folds back on itself.
Dead Dinosaurs Echoes avoids polish and certainty, yet feels deliberate in its imperfection. It’s a record that demands attention, not explanation. Rough edges remain, but they enrich the listening, giving texture and depth. The trio has taken fragments of history, place, and sound, and forged them into something stubborn and alive – an instrumental debut that already feels weathered, layered, and complete.
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Released by Electric Valley Records on October 17, 2025
