The Spirit Hugo Race & The True Spirit

• 1 Man Check Your Woman 04:27
• 2 Elevate My Love 04:31
• 3 The Information 03:33
• 4 Sleepwalker 04:36
• 5 Heaven or Die 01:45
• 6 Bring Me Wine 04:13
• 7 Dollar Quarter 06:04
• 8 Heartbreak 69 03:32
• 9 Wildcards 04:12
• 10 Higher Power 04:49
• Total Runtime 41:42

Info for The Spirit

Hugo Race and his long time collaborators the True Spirit release their first album in seven years on May 29th 2015 through German independent Glitterhouse Records. ‘The Spirit’ is the band’s 12th studio album, not including live albums and retrospectives and while Hugo’s prolific and eclectic catalogue includes solo albums and an astonishing variety of international collaborations, The Spirit presents a return to his roots in a psych-rock zone tagged by Melody Maker in the band’s early days as ‘industrial trance blues’.

“We built a studio in a house out on the city’s edge to slowly develop the songs at our own speed with no pressure. We’d never had the luxury before of playing new songs live before recording them. When we felt the time was right, we taped a lot of the final album with Idge at his Soundpark studio, capturing our sound with ambient mics and vintage processors. But the vibe of that house and the all-night recording sessions with the background buzz of cicadas and the homemade instruments in the tool shed, its all still there. We wanted to create a definitive album for The True Spirit and took our sweet time about it. This record is it.”

“I see the True Spirit as connected to my original reasons for making music in the post-punk time, a kind of collision of influences that include the cosmic side of psychedelia, the analogue razor blade attack of primal blues (ie – the 30s and 40s and early 50s), as well as soft sexy soul music and electronica. We’ve always felt comfortable outside the ‘box’ of easy categorization and we’ve never hesitated to pull in streams and influences from the political or the spiritual, developing our personal obsessions and refining them down into something for the mind and body and soul.” - Hugo Race

Hugo Race, vocals, guitar
Michelangelo Russo, electronics
Bryan Colechin, bass
Brett Poliness, drums, percussion
Nico Mansy, keyboards

The True Spirit
is a loose, freewheeling fraternity of like-minded free spirits with a shared love of psychedelic rock and roots music. Their irreverent experimentalism has fleshed out Hugo Race's music onstage in and in studio for over twenty years. Originally from Melbourne, in early 1989 Hugo moved base to Berlin, and Normal Records (Germany) released his first True Spirit album “Rue Morgue Blues” as the Wall fell. So began two decades based in Europe and the production of 14 Hugo Race & True Spirit albums, the latest of which “53rd State” was released in Australia (Spooky Records) and Europe (Glitterhouse Records) in 2008 to rave reviews.

“Urban dreamscapes… elegant trip-hop… ambient noise psychedelia… raw cosmic blues… live garage rock… cinematic melancholia, new wave nostalgia, essential songwriting, post-rock minimalism…” – all these descriptions have been applied to Hugo’s work, best summarised as:

“Hugo Race is a psychedelic prophet, a 360 degree artist who makes compromises with nobody.” (Debaser, Italy, 2005)

“Both alone with a guitar or with his True Spirit, Hugo has toured Europe repeatedly, performing on a vast trajectory from the UK to Greece and was literally one of the first western “underground” acts performing inside the ex- eastern bloc European territories after the fall of the Wall. He has followed a personal musical vision in a series of mutating line-ups that have fused the boundaries between the "primal" (roots) blues and raw electronica - described by London Sounds as "night music of the soul", and by Melody Maker as "industrial-trance-blues". “ (Ludger Kordt, KGB, Germany)

“The stripped to the bone sound of the True Spirit exercises a fascination not exactly reassuring, yet magnetic in its evocation of obscure dangers. Music from the wild side of the street – or better, like walking blind in a war-zone…” (- Gianluca Testani, Mucchio Selvaggio)

“Hugo Race remains one of the great unsung talents of Australian music, and with ‘The Gold Street Sessions’, the leathery old wolf of the nightmare psycho blues returns… The Gold Street Sessions requires a darkened room and an open bottle. Doubt not – this is a dangerous little record from a songwriter who is only ever the real deal” (- Jonathon Alley, MAG Australia)

This album contains no booklet.