If I’m a sucker for anything in this universe, it’s Swedish stoner rock. There’s plenty of great bands out there from the rest of the world, but for my money, the Swedes do it with a love and respect for the genre that — as a nation — no one else can match. You’re be hard pressed these days to even find a band in the US to admit they even play stoner rock, let alone actually do it.

As such, Stockholm‘s Death Rattle Six, who’ve just self-released their second album in two years (fourth overall) in the form of Death Rattle Six, are definitely on my radar. I haven’t heard the complete album, but the old-school four-piece (vocals, guitar, bass, drums) have posted four of the tracks on their MySpace page for checking out, and I’ve been gladly rocking out to the early Dozerisms of “Rover” and the Truckfighters-style fuzz of “Down the Hole.” Death Rattle Six claim an Alice in Chains influence, and I can hear it in the way singer Greg layers his voice on “The Beast Within,” but it’s not the rampant bottom of the mouth “Hey whoa yea-yuh” that’s infected so much of American commercial hard rock in the last two decades. More like a less laid back Asteroid.

If any of these words — Dozer, Truckfighters, Asteroid — are ringing a bell with you, you’d do well to look up “Torn Inside,” which makes use of a similar nighttime desertry. Death Rattle Six are, at least on these four tracks, playing desert rock exclusively, but if their genre sticktoitiveness is admirable, all the more so is the fact that the basic instrumental tracks for the Death Rattle Six album were done completely live. As in the most successful cases where that’s so, these songs have an urgency to them which simply can’t be faked.

They have links (again, on their MySpace) where you can buy Death Rattle Six on CDBaby or iTunes, but they also appear to be giving it away via internationally famed torrent site The Pirate Bay. Of course, The Obelisk urges you to support quality independent talent however you can. For me, that means keeping Death Rattle Six on the radar and looking forward to hearing the rest of the album.

With Finnish doomers Garden of Worm, the trick in listening is not to succumb to riff hypnosis and miss out on the interludes and progressive movements that make their sound unique. Right from the opening track of their self-titled debut Shadow Kingdom full-length, the trio offer deceptive intricacy on songs like “Spirits of the Dead” and “The Ceremony,” sounding on the one hand like little more than post-Reverend Bizarre players in a crowded scene, but actually exploring roots both deeper and more satisfying to hear. You’re not three songs in before they break out the mellotron sounds.

In fact, you’re not through the aforementioned “Spirits of the Dead” before a left turn leads to a proggy-type jam that concludes the cut. The guitars of EJ. Taipale take a temporary backseat to SJ. Harju’s foundational bass (both also handle vocals), and gradually the track comes to an apex with the driven cymbal work of drummer JM. Suvanto, and if you weren’t paying attention you could have easily missed it. To be perfectly clear, this is doom we’re dealing with. Garden of Worm play doom and Garden of Worm is a doom album. “The Black Clouds” is lumbering, slow and riff-led, with crashes and mournful vocals in the grand tradition. There’s just also more to it structurally. Like the opener, it soon twists toward the progressive for its back end.

The second half of Garden of Worm is little different from the first, although anyone with a track name fetish should be able to easily get off on “Psychic Wolves.” As for the song itself, it’s a great hulking beast, all the more powerful coming off “The Black Clouds” – both songs are well past seven minutes in length – but Taipale’s guitar leads into a jazzy, near Opethian thoughtful musical space where the song seems to want to rest a while. Guest keyboards from Markus Pajakala (who also provided the “mellotron” to “Rays from Heaven”) make the piece standout, but the real surprise is when a heavy Scott Kelly-style riff takes hold and Garden of Worm transpose the vocal style they’ve been using the whole time over top of it. You wouldn’t think it would fit, but they make it work.

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[NOTE: New posts will appear underneath this post for the rest of the week. You know the deal.]

audiObelisk Transmission 006

Truth be told, I was planning a special UK-only podcast even before Chris and Pete from Trippy Wicked and the Cosmic Children of the Knight were so hospitable to me in April. There’s been a Post-It on my desk with a list of bands on it since February. Pretty sad, I know.

But it’s all the more appropriate that it goes live today, when Germany‘s psychic octopus proved correct and England was knocked out the World Cup. Having watched the US succumb to the unstoppable force known as the Ghanaian team yesterday, I can empathize. We bleed as one, except, you know, it matters to England.

As always, this audiObelisk Transmission is culled from my own rips, made with love in honor of the UK‘s many contributions to the heavy underground. Making your way through it, you’ll notice a couple glaring omissions, among them Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden. I wanted to keep it focused on stoner rock and doom (apart from the bonus track), and while I know these bands are vastly influential, I’d rather spend that time listening to Uriah Heep, Leaf Hound and Atomic Rooster. Yeah, there’s Deep Purple and Black Sabbath on the playlist. It’s a pretty fine line.

We start off (following a Snuff Box sample) with London‘s Kings of Frog Island, and I think it’s a pretty good flow of songs and styles thereafter. The UK has had so much diversity, sound wise, it was all I could do to hold it together. In my most trying moments, I thought of England.

Playlist is after the jump…

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Be sure to check in this weekend, as the July podcast is going to go up either tomorrow or Sunday. Should be a good time, I’m looking forward to putting it together.

Meanwhile, I figured it’s only appropriate given yesterday’s Where to Start post to close out this week with some high grade Maryland doom. The clip above is Internal Void performing on a local access cable show in their native state. There’s some killer material in the beginning for fans of Dr. Steve Brule too. I consider it a bonus for the ultra Sabbathy rock that follows.

Next week we’ll close out June and I’ll give the numbers (not great), and we’ll check in for an interview with Gozu‘s Marc Gaffney, whose album, Locust Season, is available now on iTunes from Small Stone. If you’re planning on hitting Floor tomorrow night in Brooklyn, I’ll be there. Come say hi. We’ll hang out like the real people do.

Other than that, be safe and enjoy the weekend. If you didn’t yet download the June podcast, now’s the time.

Of all the “oh man, that’s a bummer” musical dissolutions, the quick one that befell Battle of Mice after their first (and only) album, A Day of Nights, was especially pointed. I’ve always dug Made Out of Babies in a middling kind of way, but vocalist Julie Christmas‘ performance on that Battle of Mice record was landmark. Just fantastic. One can only hope she puts the same fervor into her first solo album, which is due out this Fall. Ever illuminating, the PR wire informs thusly on that and other Christmas‘ other projects:

Brooklyn‘s Julie Christmas has been mysteriously under the radar as of late. But far from disappearing, the emerging singer/songwriter has been busier than ever. Christmas is scheduled to release her first solo record, The Bad Wife, this fall. More details about the album are forthcoming, but “July 31st,” a song from the pending release, is featured on the soundtrack for Paramount film, Wrong Turn at Tahoe, starring Harvey Keitel and Cuba Gooding, Jr. A video to promote the album is in production.

“I use sounds to express feelings and ideas that I am too clumsy to get across with words alone,” explains Christmas. “Working with amazing visual artists — people who speak in images — gets me one step closer to really communicating with anyone nuts enough to listen.”

Currently, Christmas is also collaborating with Nix Turner, renowned illustrator of worldwide counterculture icon, Emily the Strange, to create a book titled The Scribbles and Scrapes of Amy Anyone: A Multiple Personality Autobiography. Christmas wrote the story and is working on music for the release of an accompanying CD, which features a tone signaling the reader to turn the page.

In addition, the singer recently worked on the soundtrack for a French indie film Le Debut, in which a young couple resorts to infanticide when faced with the challenges of poverty, depression and parenthood. Christmas’s band, Made Out of Babies, is currently writing their fourth full-length album, scheduled to be released in the Spring of 2011. Live shows and exhibitions with visual artists are being arranged.

Having never encountered either Flat Tires or The Asound (which I assume is like the sound, but opposite), I reveled in the chance to check out this Flat Tires vs. The Asound split 7” single on Tsuguri Records, and all the more so once I saw the Jeff Clayton (The Antiseen) cover art, which has Sasquatch fighting a giant eagle on it. If there’s a more perfect metaphor for the current state of affairs in our nation, folks, I don’t know what it is.

Both bands call North Carolina home, Flat Tires in Hickory and The Asound in Connelly’s Springs, so they have that in common. The Asound have a more straightforward riff rock approach and are the younger of the two bands, having formed in 2009, whereas Flat Tires, for all four and a half minutes (two songs) of material they present here, affect a well-established aesthetic combining outlaw country and hardcore punkabilly that’s quick, to the point, and on Flat Tires vs. The Asound, really, really misogynist. Take that, ladies.

Flat Tires opens with “G D Woman,” on which vocalist Clint Harrison, sounding like a combination Hank III, Unknown Hinson and drunken uncle, threatens in the direction of some female, “Get out of my face or I’ll have to punch you in your face,” which I found neither charming nor humorous. The band behind Harrison (Bryon Smallwood on guitar, Jeremy Godfrey on drums and Scott Cline on bass) rocks furious and fast in a heavy honky tonk ZZ Top kind of way on “Crybaby,” which is topped with more lyrical ladybashing, the chorus being, “Cry baby, cry baby, whine, whine, whine.” Uh huh. Okay.

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I missed Eyehategod when they played their Thursday set at this year’s Roadburn festival, which is a bummer. But now, thanks to the wonders of technology, even I can pretend I was there with this live audio stream. If you missed the last two batches of streams, they are here, and here.

And if you’d like to read what Mr. Bower Power himself, Jimmy Bower, has to say about playing Roadburn, check out our interview here. Please enjoy the set and thanks once again to Walter and the Roadburn crew:

Eyehategod live at Roadburn 2010

Maryland‘s is pretty much the style people mean when they say “traditional doom.” There are three things you want to know right away about the Maryland scene, and they are as follows: Pentagram, The Obsessed and Hellhound Records. With that as your starting point, you can’t really go wrong, but like any fertile bandscape, Maryland (and, by extension the D.C., or “Doom Capitol” scene) has much more to offer the curious listener than just its biggest bands.

In addition to the five albums I’m listing here, you might also want to check out material from Iron Man (Shadow Kingdom has a couple cool reissues and their latest album), Unorthodox, Against Nature, Spirit Caravan, Wretched, Place of Skulls, Nitroseed and many more. But, to get you introduced to the scene and some of its most influential and important acts, feel free to start with the following:

1. Pentagram, First Daze Here: You can get Relentless instead if you feel strongly about it, there are no shortage of reissues out there, but if you really want to understand Pentagram‘s influence, you need to go to their earliest recordings, and this Relapse compilation has them. American doom from the age of Sabbath. They laid the foundation.

2. The Obsessed, Lunar Womb: I picked Lunar Womb because MeteorCity reissued it a couple years back and it’s easy to come by. In this age of wonders, you could just as easily pick up The Church Within if you’re looking to spend a little more. The Obsessed is the band that first gave us guitarist/vocalist Scott “Wino” Weinrich, whose influence is paramount in modern doom. Currently on the road with the reunited Saint Vitus, he can also be heard in Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand and elsewhere.

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