Fossil

I think it’s reasonable to call Fatima original weirdos. For instance, the French trio can certainly lay claim to being the only band on this website that simultaneously sound like Nirvana and Arabic folk music, but actually their real genre is more like stoner metal. Probably the best non-musical aspect to their mystique can be glimpsed on their album covers, including this third full-length with its model dinosaur dripping something gooey - yeah, the toys. A lot of Fossil is either about toys or is playing with the listener in other ways: see the lyrics to ‘Arch-Vile’ for really whack comments on evolution, having fun with dinosaurs, and musical rip-offs, where the chorus actually contains the line “We’re all covering the same songs”. That cut particularly seems to mirror the grunge movement’s quiet/loud dynamics, though these guys prove capable of a whole lot more over the course of 41 minutes.

Unlike the rather compact Turkish Delights that I listened to in the first lockdown, Fossil takes its time a bit more, curiously grouping longer and slower songs near the start of the listen, which gave me quite a poor impression at first. Most metal bands would let riffs stick in your head if possible, but Fatima prefer to use their power trio skills to make the rhythms work in their favour, drums dropping in and out to control density and filling the space with wafts of eastern melody, then applying more power with the nasal grungy vocals. The reason that stoner makes more sense as a label stems from the fuzz feeling more of that type than grunge distortion, long slow movements in ‘Turks Fruit’ turning towards doom as well. The surprisingly spacious environs of these songs also seem to have a certain trippy oddness to them, and happily in this case I can’t put my finger on other stoner acts who have a sound like Fatima’s, so that’s a strong point in their favour.

On the flipside, Fossil doesn’t cope so well at differentiating the 10 songs from one another. That’s perplexing to me in a way, because each one surely has distinct features; it’s more like the dynamics of the album in general struggle to take hold, with too much drift and not enough definite punch. Maybe that comes from listening to too much metal, yet I’d argue that the sonic profile of this recording ends up a lot sparser than Fatima’s last and suffers for it. Not until the fifth song, ‘Feathered Fossils’ (and this one is certainly about dinosaurs), could I call anything up-tempo, while even this sub-3 minute effort lounges at moments as it alternates between vocal parts and vaguely atmospheric breathers. And then ‘Sacred Chickens’ follows: another more up-tempo cut probably about dinosaurs (and the prince of Persia). The solution seems obvious and would be very simple, so I can’t help feel disappointed that the running order affects a bunch of good songs more than it should, seeing as the more riff-happy Fatima on the briefer numbers would complement the spacey vibe elsewhere. These dudes have remained interesting, but their best work still remains in front of them.