To those who don’t know, gazpacho is a cold tomato raw soup typically consumed in Spain. Quite a particular way to name a band. Especially if the band hails from Norway. Especially considering their latest effort, named Tick Tock, which brings the listener to someplace in the African or Middle Eastern deserts.
To quote the lyrics themselves, this album “feels like a magic carpet”.
The four-pieced album is indeed a voyage through the desert, lyrically (the mentioned magic carpet, sand, feminine curves of the horizon, to name a few elements) and musically, with rhytms and sounds letting the listener mentally explore images such as ancient persian markets, or incessant searches for the right way wandering among the sand dunes of seemingly endless deserts under the extreme warmth of the sunrays… ok, enough for the metaphors.
The album starts with Desert Flight, the most “canonical” of the songs, intended in the usual rock music way: energetic riff, shades of Muse in the vocal performance (the chorus in particular is pretty reminescent), a good solid rock song, ending with piano and violin patterns blending into the next song, The Walk (in two parts), the desert voyage mentioned earlier, where the lyrics expressing the feelings of the sands wanderer blend perfectly with the acoustic guitar and the oriental-feeling keyboarding, contributing to the atmosphere – which I find very fascinating -.
All flows into the title track (in three parts) perfectly, with the same feel, albeit slightly heavier and with most prominent rock instrumenting, then comes the closer Winter is Never, a fine piano-driven put-out-a-lighter-and-wave-it-left-and-right ballad, short and sweet, a pretty nice way to close the whole work in the vein of the atmospheres which it had crafted throughout its duration.
I found this album very intriguing, kind of an experience rather than a listening, adding new unnoticed before elements at every subsequent listen. Despite perhaps appearing too pretentious upon first listen, in its central part, this album grows exponentially in two spins time, capturing the listener and not letting him go till the very last piano note.
