On one of these endless summer days, nothing fits the bill quite like good old fashioned stoner rock, and if anyone knows about beating the heat, it’s The Re-Stoned, who come to us all the way from — MOSCOW? Okay, so maybe they’re not much for sunshine, but damn if they haven’t learned the lessons Karma to Burn and Fu Manchu have been teaching. Right on.

The trio are entirely instrumental, and guitarist Ilya Lipkin likes to experiment with effects, so some of that bleeds into the songs (a couple of which you can hear on The Re-Stoned‘s MySpace page), but there’s a lot here that’s just straight up fuzzriffic — so much so, in fact, The Re-Stoned even have their own custom distortion pedal. You know that’s damn fuzzy.

Hard not to dig the wah-bass Vladimir Nikulin provides on “Return,” and I don’t know what the groove of “Mountain Giant” is In Search Of, but I’m pretty sure it found it. They’ve also got a live jam posted that’s pretty tasty, and a mellower cut called “Sleeping World” where they let their inner “Planet Caravan” shine. The three studio tracks come off 2009’s Return of the Reptiles EP (R.A.I.G.), but they’ll be featured on the forthcoming Revealed Gravitation full-length as well, which is expected out soon.

I know I say it all the time, but it just goes to show how universal The Heavy really is. Kids in the desert can get down every bit as easily as kids in snowy Moscow, and on a sweltering day, all you have to do is fire up the intertubes and you’ve got a main line to yet another killer band. This is a wondrous age, my friends.

Tags: Moscow, R.A.I.G., Russia, The Re-Stoned

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 9:39 am and is filed under On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.