I Am You Are

Perhaps named after one of the nutty chorus lines from Gong's "Pothead Pixies," I Am You Are starts off Jennifer Gentle's promising debut with a collage of strange noises and clatters appropriately titled "Soundcheck." That this should immediately shift to "Sweet Girl, I Love You!," a twangy, slow head nodder sung with a combination of screams and Southern drawls — all this from young Italians, it needs to be kept in mind — somehow seems right. From there the quartet proceed to not make sense in a gloriously playful way throughout. If the end results aren't as totally successful as the equally fried debut from similarly psych-obsessed youngsters Gorky's Zygotic Mynci from nearly a decade previous, Jennifer Gentle are still onto something that bodes well for the future. Fasolo makes for a nicely off frontman — not everything is completely understandable and is often downright fragmentary, and it doesn't seem to be a matter of language translation as it is his own stylistic jumps. Echo-shrouded mystic, screeching yeller, winsome crooner, squiggly chipmunk impersonator, it's all in there — sometimes in the same song — and he sounds like he's having total fun with it all. "No Mind in My Mind" is a wonderfully silly example of that, with Fasolo coming up with some delicious semi-whines over the semi steel-drum beat (not to mention the plopped-in-the-middle fuzz guitar solo). The band as a whole picks up on this well, able to jump from heavier-duty stabs into drone and trance like the quite grand "Bring Them" and "Rubber and South" to something like the mock-Germanisms of "The Strumpfhouse Melodie" or the accordion-led mushmouth-and-yells oompah/guitar freakout "Husbands." Then there's the flute-tinged la-de-da that is "Rudy's Key-Balls" — heaven knows what that's meant to refer to, but the dippy haze the song creates down to Gastaldello's brushed drums sure sound good.