I’m sure many of us recall when Black Country, New Road broke out into the scene in 2021 with their debut record. I vividly remember the exact thing that excited me the most when I heard For the first time for the first time (unintentional, I swear) was the erratic jazzy build-ups and crescendos, notably in “Instrumental” and “Opus”. Hell, I even talked about that record here and swooned about those particular elements of their music, and I’ve been desperately searching for something else to scratch that specific itch ever since. If you’re anything like me (my deepest condolences to you) and BC,NR’s wild jazzy parts and the explosive climaxes are what excited you most about their music, boy have we a treat for you. Behold: Maruja and their newest release, Tír na nÓg!
Maruja effortlessly breathes a gust of fresh air into post-rock/punk with their jazz and experimental leanings that truly do make for an unforgettable experience. Taken straight from the live performance video embedded below: ‘Tír na nÓg is a name given to the Celtic Otherworld in Irish mythology. It’s a parallel universe where magic spawns from, the source of creativity.’ Now, with that little tidbit of trivia knowledge, you’ll come to realize that there is no other way to describe or title this EP as aptly as that. With the music that you’re about to hear, it’ll be obvious that magic spawned and happened to be recorded and boom, EP! One other thing I should mention is that the EP was entirely improvised?!? These lads truly do harbor the source of all creativity known to mankind, and I am forever envious of them. I can guarantee that you’ll feel the same way after hearing just a few minutes of the madness that is about to ensue.
Tír na nÓg is very much musical ego death, with hallucinatory soundscapes and constantly evolving movements that completely reset all that you know and have come to expect from music as a whole. It feels as if that two-hour album by Neptunian Maximalism (Éons) was somehow distilled down into just 22 minutes with a healthy dosage of BC,NR’s melodramatic flair. One minute, you’re meditating along to hauntingly eerie vocalizations, careening saxophones, and dizzying percussive effects and then some Car Bomb-esque pew-pew-pew-pew-pews (yes, that’s the scientific musical term for it) come out of left field because why not; musical parkour at its finest and honestly, I’m here for it. The more I listen to and think about it, this type of musical aberration can only be birthed through improvisation, and I say that in the absolute best way possible.
Musical improvisation is something that can easily go in one direction or the other, with zero middle ground whatsoever. While it is much more common for it to fizzle out the moment it begins, there is always the tiniest sliver of a chance that it will lead to an enormous display of musical fireworks, or rather an intriguingly hellish descent into madness in the case of Tír na nÓg. Improvisation is something you’d mainly see executed by a single individual and not so much by a group of people. As if it wasn’t hard enough already for one person to improvise well on their own, doing so as a collective is an entirely different beast. With how Tír na nÓg turned out, I am fully convinced the band is capable of collective telepathy to make this musical stream of consciousness become reality. The gents in Maruja are all simultaneously transcending the musical astral plane as if they were a single living entity.
I’ve said this many times across various different other reviews, but it is always the artists that are completely unbeknownst to me to leave me breathless, and even moreso those that go as far of breaking musical conventions. UMG may disagree with me, but music doesn’t always need to conform to rules and commercially successful patterns purely for the sake of maximizing profit. It may be a surprise to many, but the best music comes from the depths of our soul and psyches. The principles of music are without a doubt indispensable (not to suggest that Maruja don’t utilize them) but they’ve clearly had something subconsciously brewing over the course of their entire lives for it to come out and be captured in the form of Tír na nÓg as if it was their destiny all along.
