Words by Jason Lee; photos by Kevin Condon
Look we don’t wanna take too much credit here. But we do remember a while back recommending to Brooklyn-by-way-of-Venezuela very-loud-rock-band Joudy and to their vocalist and guitarist Diego Ramirez in particular (Joudy is pronounced “howdy” which makes perfect sense if you think about how jalapeño is pronounced hal-uh-peen-yo and also features Carlos Rey and Hulrich Navas on bass and drums respectfully and respectively) that they needed to record their epic version of Massive Attack’s “Angel” that they often included in their live shows…
…cuz whenever they do play it in their live sets you can see people’s prefrontal cortexes start to melt away and unrestrained animal instinct start to take over due to attendant lack of emotional regulation leading to a mass psychosis of twitching/jerking/frenzied dancing among anyone within earshot in some of the first known mass outbreaks of St. Vitus’s Dance to be recorded since sometime around 1598 and now they’ve finally gone and done it…
perfectly capturing the moody, mystical thrum and the hypnotic churn of the original version except reimagined as heavy metal in the original sense of William Burroughs (inventor of the term!) and his character “Uranian Willy” and The Insect People of Minraud whose heavy metal music inflamed their “cold insect brains like white hot buzz saws sharpened in the ovens” which is exactly what Joudy do with their psychedelic blooz meets garage rock power trio rendition of “Angel” stripped of its electronic elements and sequenced loops yet with Carlos’s mesmeric bass playing standing in perfectly for the throbbing two-note motif produced on digital sampler that serves as the foundation for the original 1998 rendition…
..and likewise the song’s immaculate build from a hushed whisper a frenzied anxiety dream as depicted in the now-classic video but whereas original guitarist Angelo Bruschini (RIP) built a wall of sound through expert textual manipulation on the new rendition (for which I expect some residuals!) Diego doesn’t just build a wall but explodes into space with paroxysms of molten sonic lava erupting from his strings in the song’s extended coda as Hulrich and Carlos grind away at the song’s core groove…
…assisted by equal parts fuzz, wah, raga, Coltrane circa Ascension and Acapulco Gold (just speculating there on the latter!) and if there was a Woodstock Festival in 2025 and Jimi Hendrix were to be rssurrected it’d be easy to imagine him covering “Angel” instead of the Star-Spangled Banner as the first rays of morning light crept over the horizon and it sounding pretty much exactly like what’s heard on this single with with Joudy as his backup band of course as Jimi lets loose with waves of paint-peeling feedback and dissonantly bent notes and dive bombs and finger-tapped harmonics and just a whole voxabulary of heavy shreddage in general…
…so anyways in case yr not already familiar with Massive Attack’s “Angel” it leads off their classic 3rd LP Mezzanine which was released on April 20th, 1998 (4/20 yo…better keep that date free this year!) making the album feel as if it’s being birthed directly from the skull of a deity as previously mentioned spawned fully formed and en medias res decked out in a full set of armor comprised of throbbing, shuddering, undulating sonic textures built upon the aforementioned two-note electro-bass ebbing and flowing like a Venezuelan mountain range of massive table-top peaks and valleys (known as tepuis) rising dramatically and falling just as precipitously from the landscape below…
…as the track moves seamlessly from the narcoticized haze of the its faded-in opening to the churning swirl of a funnel cloud forming directly overhead as the song reaches its sustained climax except in the Joudy version the funnel cloud actually touches down and bulldozes everything in its path but with such sublime ferocity that you’d be inclined to stand there mouth agape bearing witness rather than running for your life and (fun fact!) despite the song sounding it was hatched fully formed from Zeus’s forehead “Angel” was born just as much from random circumstance…
…when Massive Attack’s trinity of songwriter/producers convened with roots reggae legend Horace Andy for their third time collab-ing having previously provided the band with vocals on a number of tracks on first two previous LPs, Blue Lines and Protection as they prepared to record a new track together itself planned to be a cover version but when Horace refused to sing the Clash’s “Straight To Hell” due to being a devoutly religious man who may’ve sired something like 30 children with something like 17 women but who refused to utter the word “hell”…
…heaving the trio of Daddy, Mushroom, and 3D to improvise on the spot, reworking the track they’d painstakingly assembled—stripping much of it away in fact so that it became the maximal-minimalist masterpiece it’s known as today with an exquisitely dub-inflected production that fills up the open spaces with cool little studio-based touches and and vast cavernous echo and reverb massive low end that when heard thru a good pair or headphones or speakers is likely to swallow your grey matter and all its contents whole…
…with ad hoc lyrics borrowed in large part from the already existing Horace Andy song “You Are My Angel” that when crossed with the aborted studio tracks for “Straight To Hell” ends up settling into an sonically and emotionally complex Purgatory of a groove with the overall sound of the track springing equally from the rich and complex soil of the so-called Bristol Sound that Massive Attack themselves helped pioneer—Bristol being one of UK’s most racially diverse cities but one that was semi-unified at the time with all sides of society feeling the brunt of economic disinvestment and deindustrialization during the 1980s and ‘90s all of which you could call “the art of making do” and “the art of maximum effect from minimal means” and quite brilliantly so too cuz necessity is the mother of invention as Frank Zappa was prone to say…
…all of which helped spawn the so-called Bristol Sound which itself spawned the sub-genre known as “trip hop” whose other early practitioners (many of whom find the label itself to be “bollocks” so go figure!) included Tricky (an early member of M.A. before going solo following Blue Lines), Portishead and Smith & Mighty (or more tangentially Flyer Saucer Attack, Neneh Cherry, and Roni Size) with Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, Andy “Mushroom” Vowles, and Robert “3D” Del Naja developing a unique synthesis of Jamaican soundsytems, dub reggae and hip hop crossed with the “trippyness” of modern-day electronic music, cutting-edge post-punk (think The Pop Group when it comes to Bristol-based post-punk in particular) with spy movie soundtracks, ambient soundscapes, and a dash of avant-garde jazz among other ingrediants…
…mixed into a moody mystical musical soufflé that puts across dread and lust in equal measure on a song like “Angel” that couldn’t be more ideal for getting blunted to whether literally or figuratively and zoning the f*ck out lost in your own thoughts or lack thereof but also equally, weirdly ideal for getting amped up and physically engaged with what with all the head-nodding reggae and hip hop riddims and body-shifting bass frequencies alongside the roiling sense of tension and shiver-up-the-spine anticipation borrowed from the best of post-punk music and EDM…
…with the band Joudy themselves being equally latter-day practitioners of “the art of making do” cuz here’s a band made up of three cousins or some equally close genealogical equivalency who started off playing as a five-piece in Venezuela years ago specializing in shoegazy indie rock inflected by ingenious Venezuelan musical forms before several of ‘em ended up emigrating to the States just as so many other Venezuelans did at the time entering an era marked by socio-political upheaval with the three of them quite by circumstance all ending up in Gotham City and re-constituting themselves as a newly stripped down yet newly supercharged version of their former selves as their already masterful musicianship and sense of familial psychic connection continued to sharpen…
…thus making “Angel” a sort of poetically perfect choice of cover version and the perfect single to follow up the band’s 2023 LP Destroy All Monsters previously reviewed in these pages (both put out on the meticulously curated local boutique label Trash Casual who select only the finest and most casual of trash to be released under their imprint) that feels like the prefect astringent palate cleanser clearer the way for the newest and latest phrase of the Joudy brotherhood or ok cousinhood…
*******
“Angel” composed by Massive Attack, arranged and interpreted by:
Diego Ramirez – Vocalist, Guitar
Carlos Rey – Bassist
Hulrich Navas – Drums
Recorded and mixed by Tom Beaujour; Mastered by Alan Douches.
MUSIC VIDEO directed and produced by Esteban Chacin and Gabriel Duque.
Lettering and Artwork made by Jose Andrade (Frase8).
Press Photoshoot by Kevin Condon.
From the boyz: “Join us to celebrate the release of “Angel” at @ourwickedlady on Wednesday 4/2 w/ @superswellband@sorrynotsorryisaband@gummy__nyc — Free shots + drink specials courtesy of @jagermeister & @teremana!
Limited edition Angel hoodies available now on Joudy’s Shopify.