Naked Truth - Shizaru

Since last year when I received a package of six albums in the mail from the RareNoise Records label, I was completely spell bound after I wrote an ecstatic review on WorldService Project’s For King and Country. I’ve wanted to discover the label thanks to Sid Smith’s Podcasts from the Yellow Room in which he’s introduced me to some of the band’s that made me want to write on the wish list. I’ve discovered for me one of my favorites, Naked Truth.

This is a review of their debut album entitled Shizaru released six years ago. Since the creation done by bassist Lorenzo Feliciati and featuring keyboardist Roy Powell, Pat Mastelotto (King Crimson, Stick Men) on Acoustic and Electric Drums, and Cuong Vu on Trumpet and Electronics, their music is very surreal and futuristic between the four-piece.

The title Shizaru means the fourth monkey which symbolizes “do no evil” and he may be either crossing his arms or covering his private parts. Now while I haven’t got a chance to listen to Ouroboros which is their second album and enjoyed their third album last year entitled, Avian Thug. All three of them is to me, like a circle coming in full. But let’s get straight to their debut.

It has this ambient, experimental, industrial, electronic, trip-hop, and Miles Davis sound filled with a chamber avant-jazz surrounding between the essence of Bowie’s Outside-era, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, and Brian Eno. Both the sounds and the experimentations that is on here is this mysterious travelling scenario between David Lynch’s Lost Highway or by Nicolas Winding Refn.

For my introduction to their music last year, Naked Truth are very, very good taking the listener and diving into ocean as they take them into unknown lands that is filled with a long and winding pathway filled with surreal painting done by dada artist Salvador Dali as if he’s the maestro letting the band take them wherever he goes. And where Dali takes, the listener goes with him and the band members follow. 

Shizaru is a good introduction to get you started of their music if you like the surreal dreams, the essence of Electronic, Experimental, Industrial, and Trip-Hop adventures into places you’ve never seen. And I hope they will continue to do more for the next few years to come. As Dali once said, “Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.”