Restavrant - Returns to the Tomb of Guiliano Medidici

Restavrant - Step Down

Restavrant - Nadia

I have a confession to make:  I like weird music.  It doesn’t have to be a good sort of weird either - as long as someone’s playing an instrument besides guitar, bass, keyboard, or drums and making funny noises, I’ll probably like what I’m listening to.  I mean, I’ve probably spent more time in my life listening to Frank Zappa (especially “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”) than I have grocery shopping.

So keep that in mind while I spend the next few paragraphs explaining how much I like Restavrant’s Return to the Tomb of Guiliano Medidici.

At first, Restavrant comes off as a sort of low budget extension of O’Death - same manic energy, same twisted folk sound.  While O’Death call themselves “gothic/country/punk,” Restavrant describe their sound as “electro/country/punk” - both genre trios are collections of opposed sounds, philosophies, and cliques.

As you spend more time listening to Returns to the Tomb of Guiliano Medidici, other influences emerge: “Silver $urprises” is a traditional Southern rhythm & blues call and response tune, sped up to the limits of foot-tapping speed with the addition of machine gun synth beats.  Several other tracks follow a similar formula, propelled by such quick synth beats and guitar picking that the songs become all call, no time for response.  No matter how these songs begin, they almost all eventually devolve into an explosion of found percussion (Is that a cuckoo clock being beaten at the end of “Home?”) moans, and whispers.

While most of Restavrant’s songs are between three and four minutes long, the album’s final track, “Returns to the Tomb of Guiliano Medidici,” is an impressive 13 minute epic.  Though the track is initially similar in structure to the album’s shorter tracks, it’s much more experimental - swamp rock chords seem to mimic the driving refrain of modern electro, building to the sort of angry intensity seen so brilliantly in Justice’s “Stress.”  By five minutes in, this guitar repetition is replaced by Troy Murrah and his shouting chorus.  The human instruments are a welcome relief, though they quickly fade and are eventually replaced by what sounds like a conversation recorded on a long car trip.  Though I’d question the decision to break the track into such jarringly different sections, “Returns to the Tomb of Guiliano Medidici” does show a more thoughtful, less ADD version of Restavrant’s sound.

Restavrant are on the Narnack Records label with Have You Heard favorite Lee “$cratch” Perry.  They’re on tour throughout the North East (mainly New York) and California this fall.  The “v” in Restavrant is Latin for “u.”