Namely, it’s the fact that the videos — with a few rare exceptions — blow. Part of that is timing. The Hidden Hand began before streaming media took off as a mundane part of everyday life — their first album, Desensitized, came out in 2003 — and ended before it really took off, their third and final album being 2007′s The Resurrection of Whiskey Foote. There is quality live footage of them out there, mostly from the Emissions from the Monolith festival, so it’s not like it doesn’t exist at all, but they never quite hit the level where people went out and documented every move they made, and it was before the time where every move a band made was documented and uploaded for all to see. If this band was touring today, we’d have clips of Bruce Falkinburg farting in HD. There isn’t a doubt in my mind.

By my estimation, that makes The Hidden Hand something special both in the Wino catalog and in general. Living as we do in an age of increasingly prevalent and pervasive media of a variety of forms and delivered across a range of platforms, I like the thought of a band like this, led by an artist who’s by no means obscure at this point in his career despite never having broken fully into the commercial mainstream end of the music industry, being relatively obscure.

Something to keep in mind, or not, as you watch the clip of “Sunblood.” Of course, part of the reasoning behind there only being a handful of The Hidden Hand videos uploaded could also be that the band was so fucking loud they blew out everyone’s mics. That could be the issue as well.

Here’s “Sunblood,” which appeared on Divine Propaganda, filmed at the Black Cat in Washington D.C. on Dec. 29, 2006. Happy Wino Wednesday:

It’s a battle for Sverige supremacy! Retro a retro! Winner takes Örebro! Other terrible Swedish puns!

I had this post planned to go up today even before the news came in that Witchcraft had joined the Nuclear Blast roster, where Graveyard already resides, but with the two as labelmates, it’s even better! Both bands’ pasts were already intertwined with Witchcraft guitarist/vocalist Magnus Pelander and Graveyard guitarist/vocalist Joakim Nilsson and bassist Rikard Eklund having been in under-appreciated Swedish proto-doom pioneers Norrsken together, but now their futures are interrelated as well.

So, with a host of links between the two acts, not to mention a stylistic core of ’70s worship running through both, I figured it’s time to find out which band inspires the most allegiance. Witchcraft hasn’t had a record since 2007′s The Alchemist continued the ascent to popularity that 2005′s Firewood and 2004′s self-titled began, but those albums — the first two particularly — helped set the stage for Graveyard to make their own run at heavy rocking glory, taking less direct influence from Pentagram, but still honing an ultra-analog approach on their 2007 self-titled debut and last year’s excellent Hisingen Blues.

Since it will have been five years by the time it gets out (not to mention a completely different band around Pelander) if Witchcraft has a new record in 2012, let’s make it as simple as possible and take the first album from each band. You could say Graveyard‘s songs are more rock and Witchcraft‘s more doom, but do you think the album Graveyard would have met the massive acclaim it did if not for Witchcraft paving the way? Or maybe you just think one is a better band than the other, flat out, not matter how many albums are involved? Let’s find out.

Witchcraft‘s Witchcraft vs. Graveyard‘s Graveyard. Take a second, revisit the bands/records below, and please leave a comment with your pick.

Witchcraft, “No Angel or Demon” from Witchcraft:

Graveyard, “Lost in Confusion” from Graveyard:

This is a tough one, but remember, the entire Swedish nation is depending on you, so, uh, no pressure. I’m pretty sure whoever wins this gets to be mayor of Stockholm for a week — yeah, it’s that big a deal. Hail Sweden.

But to their credit, Crown aren’t trying to pass off mechanization as something organic on these tracks. Immediately with “Cosmogasm,” it’s apparent that instead, they want to use the inorganic as the basis for their atmospherics. A synth-heavy break is topped by foreboding, disjointed notes, and screams – there are almost certainly lyrics there, but I wouldn’t at all be able to tell what they are – are gradually submerged in a mounting tide of keyboard. Like every song on The One that follows, “Cosmogasm” ends cold and abrupt, leading into the subdued but tense intro of the title-track, which kicks in its riff a little past a minute into its total 6:49 and meets it head on with a buzzsaw-sounding noise that doesn’t last past the verse but is enough to give a headache in that few measures, should you happen to be sensitive to that kind of thing. Crown never get full-on industrial, but that side of their personality is never completely absent, and S.A.’s vocals – cleaner but purposefully monochromatic – echo out modernly, but have a sort of mid-‘90s industrial/goth drama to them on “The One,” which follows the pattern of “Cosmogasm” in breaking to a quieter section before exploding back into the apex. The course for the rest of the EP seems set, but veers with centerpiece “100 Ashes,” which is Crown’s most blatantly industrial inclusion. It’s the shortest of the bunch at 4:06, but a simple electronic beat stays forward in the mix and contrasts the sleepy ambience of the guitars and keys, and the vocals feel like semi-spoken manipulations more than anything that might act as a hook. The One is nothing, however, if it isn’t atmospherically cohesive – frighteningly so, in fact, since Crown’s only been a band since 2011 – and even for the shift it represents, “100 Ashes” only furthers the overall impact the EP makes.

Together, the final two tracks, “Mare” (7:38) and “Orthodox” (9:26) make up more than half of The One’s 33-minute runtime, but more importantly, they’re also its most adventurous material. “Mare” might be the highlight of the whole work – also where that earlier Meshuggah comparison feels the most applicable – but the mostly instrumental track is driven by an undeniable groove that’s met with lead lines only when the vocals come into play, and even then, the riff continues behind. S.A. layers in growls that, like the whole of The One are well mixed – what a coincidence that the release was recorded, mixed and mastered by Stephane Azam, who just happens to also have the initials S.A. – and the overarching drone seems to be most potent on the longer material, or maybe it’s just given more time to develop. In any case, the character continues to build as “Orthodox” commences its vaguely tribal beat. They don’t hesitate to put the rhythm out front – another method transposed from industrial music – but even the forwardness of the beat to “Orthodox” doesn’t suppress the melody of the guitars or the otherworldly vocals. Crown throw in a twist when after three and a half minutes in the beat drops and the guitar takes the fore, introducing the progression that mounts the build in the last six minutes, P.G. and S.A.’s guitars intertwining in what becomes a righteously slow rhythm, the “drums” dropping to half-time behind. There’s another stop, but it’s more to enhance the build than undercut its momentum, and even after nine minutes, when “Orthodox” ends, it feels sudden and soon. I guess that’s life, you might say in black and white while smoking a cigarette, but Crown seem to be dealing with more than just mortality on The One (“What else is there?” you’d ask after another drag), and whatever it is they’re beginning to puzzle out, it makes for an intriguing listen. As someone who usually decries methods that pull away from the humanity of recordings, I find exception in Crown’s semi-post-metal approach, as they seem to be able to evoke a human context for automated stimuli. They impress, and if they can keep their consistency moving forward into whatever might come next – can’t help but assume it would be The Two – they should be able to grow into something unique in underground heavy.

Crown on Bandcamp

Crown’s website

Still much missed, and as I watch Black Sabbath fumble and engage in contractual disputes and don’t hear anything about Tony Iommi‘s own bout with cancer (though they’ve scheduled more shows, and I guess that’s something), all the more so. I don’t want to dwell, so here’s a clip from 1984 of the band Dio doing “The Last in Line” at the Spectrum in Philly that says it better than I ever could anyway:

The illustrious Randall Dunn (SunnO))), Master Musicians of Bukkake, etc.) produced most of the first record, but the live track at the end, was captured in Port Orchard by none other than Tony Reed, who’d also go on to record, mix and master the trio’s second outing, 2006′s Hitchhiking to Oblivion (released on Heavy Hermit Records). Reed, bassist Eric Seipp and guitarist/vocalist Joe White trace a common lineage back to mid-’90s death metal outfit Woodrot, and in some of the warmth of bass on Hitchhiking to Oblivion tracks like “The Longhair,” one can hear the roots of Stone Axe starting to coalesce.

Golden Pig Electric Blues Band were their own entity however, and at times they were surprisingly heavy. The cover of “Tomorrow Never Knows” (I can’t imagine a scenario in which they didn’t know that Trouble already did the song, so call it a double-tribute if you want) from the first album and the “Electric Funeral”-ized “Apehanger Messiah” from the second are both sharpened with a metal edge, and while sometimes the vocals of White and drummer Jerome Seipp are laid back and dry enough to remind me of Against Nature‘s ultra-chill modus, the tones are heavier and Jerome hits hard on the drums even behind a boogie rocker like “Vol. 4″ or the harmonica-infused blues number “The Basilisk.”

To the best of my knowledge, the band was last heard from on Small Stone‘s 2009 digital-only Northwest Mind Meld compilation, put together by Van Conner (VALIS/Screaming Trees). Their two tracks included there were highlights (review here), but Eric and Joe both play in the Sabbath tribute band Luke’s Wall (Reed‘s in there as well), and as Woodrot came out of their retirement for some shows at the end of the last decade, it’s pretty clear that when it comes to these guys, nothing is quite ever off the table. As I was recently fortunate enough to have both the Golden Pig Electric Blues Band records come into my possession, I figured I’d pass along the recommendation for anyone else who finds themselves in the position of perpetually having room in their heart for sincere, tonally rich Sabbath worship. Consider this that recommendation, and check out “Mizz Marvel” from the first record below:

That’s basically what Blood Red Water seem to be doing here. “Avoid the Relapse” veers into some more rocking territory, but the majority of Tales of Addiction and Despair finds the four-piece well in their sludgy element – even the Vitus-isms of “Ungod” are reworked into that context. I won’t speculate as to any of the band members’ personal experiences with either of the EP’s titular afflictions, but at very least the music sounds genuine in its nastiness, “Considerations/Commiserations” bouncing ideas off Sourvein and Acid Bath as Michele tries to work a moaning clean line in here and there. Volt’s guitar is suitably vicious on the three-minute track, taking a descending riff into a more chugging break about halfway through to give a touch of classic metal to what’s already not entirely sludge but not entirely anything else either. What ties all the material together is the aggression, and that never really subsides enough to be completely gone. Even “Avoid the Relapse” shifts to a guttural feel in its chorus. What might be straightforward stoner rock in another context remains metallic tonally in Volt’s riffing, and Lorenzo and Fiorica keep a grooving beat, but it’s not so much of a departure from metal as an adaptation of it. The fourth of the five tracks, “Modern Slave Blues,” begins with caustic feedback and a sample talking something about dopamine, once again covering some familiar territory made more individual when Michele’s vocals kick in on the post-Entombed straight-ahead rocking progression. Things get really interesting when the song cuts to a quiet break and has to rebuild itself, but a snare lead-in from Fiorica keeps the transitions smooth. The groove is viscous and repetitive, but that’s the point, and it’s a point Blood Red Water make well as they build the song to its apex and that of the EP.

A creaking bit of atmospheric play more reminiscent of the Tales of Addiction and Despair artwork than the title itself shows up in “The Perfect Mix,” and Blood Red Water finish with a six-minute cut that, with the opener before, acts as the final slice of bread sandwiching the shorter songs. I don’t know if that’s something the band had in mind, or if the noisy/sampled finish of “The Perfect Mix” just fit best at the end – I’d believe that – but it works either way and that’s what matters. An exasperated-sounding woman speaks in Italian over guitar feedback and lower-end rumble, underscoring the Buzzov*en-esque mood of the song’s earlier sections. Their sound has plenty of spaciousness to it, but room for growth as well and Tales of Addiction and Despair sets up Blood Red Water to feasibly develop in any number of directions, be it a further inclusion of classic doom/metal influences or forays into rawer, more hardcore-based sludge. Well, I guess that’s pretty much two directions, but the tracks are interesting in and of themselves, and seem to be gearing toward moving into different musical territory while staying structurally cohesive. If Blood Red Water can do that, and can perhaps embark on a production and a mix that helps them better play up the dynamics that this EP hints at, then they should be in excellent shape whenever the time comes for the inevitable first album. Until then, Tales of Addiction and Despair has moments where it feels like the songs are serving the anger and not vice versa, and that imbalance can make a song like “Modern Slave Blues” feel like a wash of pissed-off emotionality, but there’s always been a place for imbalance in sludge, and one looks forward to hearing how Blood Red Water put that to use next time around.

Download Tales of Addiction and Despair for free

Blood Red Water on Thee Facebooks

And yeah, it may not be as plodding as the malevolent “Run Boy…” or as deranged as “Elesares,” but the band — who opened the Portland date of the Decibel tour and who’ll also be supporting Sleep when they hit Nuemo’s in Seattle on June 4 — don’t just do one thing all the time, and that makes it a little harder to pin down just one track to stream. Of course, that works in the album’s favor, and Sickness Will Pass winds up giving the impression that not only will the sickness not pass, but that it will gradually consume you until your flesh turns to chewed meat and falls from your bones. It’s not what you’d call “uplifting,” unless you’re thinking in the sense of hoisting yourself over the ledge on the roof of a building before jumping off.

The sonic diversity and consistent quality of Portland’s scene continues to impress even someone like myself, who’s about as far as you can get from it while still being in the same country, and being just a week out from Stoneburner dropping the considerable heft of Sickness Will Pass on what are no doubt the soon-to-be-broken toes of unsuspecting sludge-heads everywhere, I’m thrilled to be able to stream the bleak complexity of “Marriage” in all its seven-minute wretched splendor. Please find and enjoy it on the player below:

Stoneburner‘s Sickness Will Pass is due May 22 via Seventh Rule Recordings. For more info, check out the band on Thee Facebooks or hit up their Bandcamp page, where you can also stream album opener “Christian’s Charity,” or the Seventh Rule webstore, where one might stumble upon a wide host of goodies, from the Pacific Northwest and otherwise.

Without mentioning that I’m the only person who does reviews here, I said I was. I’d been asking about the pairing of obscure and concrete ideas that, to me, the album title and the names of several of the songs — “Shadows and Substance,” “Form and Abandon,” and so on — seemed to be driving toward. When I brought it up, Taylor already had some idea of what I was talking about. I was wrong, as it happened, in my interpretation. The real answer, go figure, was both more specific and more vague: 10 million years is how long it takes energy to form in the sun and eight minutes is as long as it takes to get to the earth. I was way off.

But I mention it not just to point out how off-base I was in estimating what I thought the album was trying to convey, but also to note that in his response, Taylor seemed to be speaking more to the review than to the question I’d actually asked, which was something unique among all the interviews I’ve done so far for this site. I’ve spoken to people who’ve seen their reviews beforehand before, and sometimes I’m more comfortable about that than others — it depends on the review and the amount of typos I find in it later — but Taylor was directly answering the case I made, and even having been wrong, that was exciting.

For me, it was also a thrill to talk to someone from Caltrop, of whom I’ve been a fan since their self-titled EP my way in 2005. I’d missed the release of 2008′s World Class (also on Holidays for Quince), but caught up to it later, and found the band’s growth as a heavy and intricately pastoral act as engaging as it was progressive. Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes, four years later, loses nothing creatively for the length of time, and as Taylor explains in the interview that follows here, the process by which he and the rest of the band — bassist/vocalist Murat Dirlik, guitarist Adam Nolton and drummer John Crouch — rounded out the record is as interesting as the record itself, basically moving away from their joint writing process to each write a whole track and bring it in to the others.

Below, Taylor talks about some of Caltrop‘s motives for taking this approach with Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes, gives his feelings as regards his band’s close relationship with Brooklyn post-metallers Hull, with whom Caltrop has toured several times (the two groups also appeared in each other’s press shots: see if you can spot them here and here), and discusses a range of other topics, including touring-life vs. real-life concerns and the reasoning behind noting who’s singing which part of a song between him and Dirlik in the liner notes of the album.

You’ll find the (mostly) complete 3,500-word Q&A after the jump. Please enjoy.

When were songs for this record written?

They’ve been written over the past several years. We put out World Class in 2008, and we pretty much immediately started writing on some of these. We got probably – have you been able to listen to the record?

Yeah, I reviewed it.

Is that you that wrote that review?

Um, I wrote a review.

There’s a review on The Obelisk. It’s long and detailed, and I thought it was awesome, man.

Yeah, that’s me. Thank you, man.

It’s rare that someone takes that effort to go into it so thoroughly. I thought it was flattering and it was great, man. Not like flattering, like shining somebody’s ass, but you went really in depth into what you thought about it, and I appreciated that.

Thank you very much, man, I appreciate that. That’s always better than “Your review sucks, fuck you.”

We wrote way back, in the last couple years, “Ancient,” “Light Does Not Get Old,” we wrote “Perihelion” and we wrote ”Blessed.” Those were really three pieces of material that we’d written and recorded as early as 2010. We recorded some of those three songs, a very rough version of them, and we were listening to those recordings, we just got together with Nick Peterson, who did the record, and we just set up and did two days – didn’t even try all that super hard to get the takes right – and we listened through those as a rough version of what we were going to do to record, and then we came back and re-recorded all of them at that warehouse in a serious recording session, and got them all done and mixed. We decided it was a 12-minute thing, a 13-minute thing and an eight-minute thing. Although it was great, we decided it needed more material to offset the longer, dense stuff. We decided to write four things that we each brought. We normally are real egalitarian and all operate within the writing process. This time, we put these four things, and everybody brought something. Everybody brought an idea and we turned that into a song. We tried to limit them to five minutes. We wrote four five-minute things to offset the more dense, longer material that we’d already written, and we recorded those in a separate [session]. We wrote those within probably eight months and recorded them in a separate session. To answer your question, this has been kind of ready to go, because we ended up not getting Holidays for Quince to agree to do it until… We wanted it out last summer or fall, honestly. Then they wanted to have a finished product for a few months, so it ended up getting basically put off until this spring, because there’s no point in putting a record out in January. That’s what happened there.

Seems like kind of a wild process, putting those other songs together. Which four was it?

Well, “Birdsong,” and then “Shadow and Substance” and “Form and Abandon,” and then “Zelma.” Those four basically are the ones that are kind of interjected between the longer piece. We split “Ancient Light Does Not Get Old” into two tracks because sometimes we’ll just play “Ancient” and go into another song or whatever. It was really because we listened to it and thought it might flow better with some stuff that was – not like we were trying to make easygoing shit, but things that would be just as good but maybe just a little less complicated and a little less dense than the other stuff. So that’s why we were like, “Alright, hey, you write a riff and come in here and we’ll turn it into a song, but you’ll be the main person that directs how it goes.” We still all ended up having input on everything, but one person drove what happened with each track, as opposed to normally, we’re all just beating each other up trying to figure out what we should do with transitions and parts and so forth.

Splitting it up among the four of you: Was part of that just trying to make a different sound on each track?

Normally, the songs we write, everybody has input. A riff will come from somebody, but it’ll get changed. The timing will change or a bridge will be added, so it’s a very thorough, all four of our input process. Doing those four tracks to flesh out the album, I don’t think we really thought about what you just suggested, but it is true. Adam, “Zelma” was a riff he’s been playing for a long time, and that’s his grandmother’s name. And it ended up being what you said, whether it was intentional or not, I guess.

So it’s almost like two different periods of writing.

Two totally different recording sessions that took place a long time from one to the other, but they all happened at the same location with the same sound engineer.

Were you worried about the two not flowing together?

Sure. Especially because we recorded it in a warehouse, and this warehouse has an active in and out of stuff that’s in it. Two of the guys work for this fella around town as carpenters, and there’s a variety of different companies that have different – when we first recorded, there was way less stuff than there was the second time, so we’re standing out in the middle of this huge, 35-foot ceiling gymnasium, basically. Was a concrete floor and we set all our stuff up, and the first time was a way different congregation of stuff than there was the second time. As what would naturally occur, Nick also had approached it the same way, but things were just a little tweaked the second recording session from the first recording session. I know for example my guitar cabinet had kind of blown out a speaker during the first recording session, and I figured that out and got it fixed before the second, so there’s a better sound on some of the guitar rhythms and some of the stuff, but it all ended up being pretty not-noticeable. Nick is so good, and we  ended up mixing it all again. We did two separate ones, but the second time incorporated changes that we had made to the drum sounds and room mics being added and taken out and so forth. That was made as a blanket across all of the tracks, and then mastering, James Plotkin did a really good job of leveling everything out. I think it comes across as a pretty seamless sound.

I wouldn’t have guessed that it was made under those circumstances. I guess that’s why I’m kind of surprised to hear it. Tell me about the difference then between writing for the first session and the second. You said everybody split it up for the second session. How was the stuff that came more directly after World Class different?

Well, the way that goes is kind of how we normally write, and everything we’ve written since is following that same pattern, so I can speak to it. What happens is it’s part-driven. Our songs are part-driven. In other words, someone will come in with a few ideas. Adam will have a few ideas, and I’ll have a few ideas, and some of them will seem to work well together. We jam on each individual part. We’ll jam on it for a long time. One part. And it’ll have ebbs and flows of its own. If you play something for five minutes and come back to it for another five or 10 minutes, and you’re just working on it, trying to explore whether, “Does this part sound good heavy and aggressive, or does it sound good pretty and more intricate? Does it sound good building one crescendo to the other?” In other words, you end up with a single riff that’s turned into a five-minute jam, where you’ve got two or three different means of liking it, and not always do we have the same opinion. This has occurred with a part that I’ve brought in, a part that Murat brought in, a part that Adam brought in, and then we’re trying to combine several of these parts into one song. Nobody sits down and says, “Alright, here’s part A, B, C, D, we’re done.” Nobody does that – except during that one particular secondary recording session that we did. We’ll go through this process whereby someone who has written a part then has to negotiate with everyone as to how it changes, because the bass player may not like this part or the guitar player may not like the guitar player as much as the other guitar player who brought it in, so they’ll want to interject a different little minor change that makes it a little interesting, throw in a bridge. And then we combine the parts. I can’t really count them out, but if you think about the song “Ancient,” there’s probably at least five different parts with little bridges and so forth, and “Perihelion”’s got even more. It’s a matter of combining those and coming up with ways they flow and coming up with bridges. What Adam always says is we have to kill our babies, because everybody ends up pissed off one way or another about what’s happened to what they originally brought in, but it’s morphed into what it is now – a Caltrop song, not a Sam riff. Just having to weed through all the stuff that we’ve jammed on and then get what’s best of it and figure a way to combine it with everybody else’s parts, to where it ends up being something which is cohesive. We definitely try and avoid having gratuitous parts. We also don’t want to be too complicated. It can’t be just nothing but music for musicians. There’s a lot of bands that I love that are really mathematical in their approach, but we always throw and element out of there. We want to let the smooth stuff and the blues follow through. And John, the drummer, is super-steady, in terms of understanding what everyone’s bringing in, interpreting it. His rhythms will change what we do. I’m going on a tangent here, but I brought in one part that we hadn’t quite worked out yet, and he plays it two different ways, and it’s incredible what it does to it. It’s awesome. To me, that’s part of the fantastic nature of writing without any expectations other than the fact that we’re going to combine our various influences and our various thoughts to come up with something that is a whole.

You mentioned “Perihelion” in there and that was a track I wanted to ask about specifically. The vocal tradeoff gave a definite impression of having multiple writers at work. Can you talk about how that song came together?

Yeah. The instrumental aspect of it is what I just described. Same as everything else we do. The actual lyrical aspect of it, Murat writes his stuff and I write my stuff. We juggle who’s gonna do what for. Aside from saying after the fact, “What is it you wrote about?” and they happen to actually go together in some poetic way, which is usually just fortunate. Everything he sings in there is what he wrote, what he was feeling, and everything I put in there lyrically is what I wrote and what I was feeling. They happen to combine. I thought they did pretty well on World Class when we traded off, too. You might think it would be disjointed, but it’s worked out to where the lyrical content flows well and makes sense even though it’s two separate authors. We also, on the record, we made sure in the liner notes to differentiate between who wrote what, so it would make sense, “These words are from Murat,” “These words are from Sam,” but they’re thematically along the same lines. I would say they’re following a similar vibe. For someone who really gets into listening to music and trying to figure out what’s going on, it’s totally interesting to have that happen. It’s a bonus. We did the same thing with World Class, except for it’s all handwritten lyrics. He hand-wrote what he wrote, and I hand-wrote what I wrote, so if you can tell our chicken scratch apart, you can tell who did what.

The title Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes. What was behind that? It seems like there’s a lot of contrast on the album between things you can perceive and things you can’t. A lot of vague vs. concrete.

That was really cool, what you’d said in that review. I hadn’t 100 percent thought of it that way specifically, but I will say that from an overarching standpoint, yeah. I’ll tell you what we mean via the title, and I’ll also say that in and of itself, it absolutely stands for a contrast of things, but it’s more question-oriented, from my perspective. It’s more question-mark oriented, than it is definitive. We talked about the title. Murat found a book. He was reading this book, and it was some physics-oriented book. I like to read a lot of science and physics, non-fiction stuff, and I was way down with the idea. What he was talking about was this one individual physicist, his interpretation of what occurs with respect to the length of time that it takes for energy inside the center of the sun to form into and travel through the mass of the sun to the exterior of the sun – that’s supposed to take 10 million years – and a photon or generation of, traveling through, back and forth across everything, 10 million years approximately on average is this guy’s interpretation it would take for that energy to form, travel and hit the exterior of the sun. As a photon, it takes eight minutes to travel to planet Earth, as a particle, beam or whatever the hell it is. So Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes is exactly a contrast, I would say less of concrete and diffuse, and more of, “How about that?” It takes 10 million years for this to happen and eight minutes for this to happen. It’s really a statement, an analogy or an allegory or whatever you want to call it. If you know that, you know that. If you don’t, you don’t. It’s an interesting contrast, really cool subject matter. The kind of stuff that everybody questions about that’s thoughtful and trying to figure out what the hell’s going on externally, outside of our small lives on this gas-filled planet. Not gas-filled, but you know what I’m saying. There’s the atmosphere and we’re living in it, and we’re just another one of a billion planets or whatever. But again, this is my perspective. Not everybody else’s. I would say that Ten Million Years and Eight Minutes and that being the length of time it takes for one thing and the length of time it takes for the other, that’s pretty much where it came from.

Way more specific than I had in mind, I guess.

Yeah, but it was kind of cool that it ended up working the way you had thought about it. The titles came individually, again. “Form and Abandon” was the title for what Murat had come up with bass-partwise, and “Shadows and Substance” was what John came up with drum-partwise. I don’t think you’re off base with what you said, and that’s one of the beautiful things about musical interpretation and art and so forth. You bring in what you perceive and what you think of it, and obviously you can expand on the meaning just through your own interpretation of it. It doesn’t give it any more or less worth. It actually kind of builds the breadth of what the body of work is. I thought it was great, what you said.

You’ve started writing again? Are you just always writing?

The thing is, we all work, a lot. And we tour. We don’t tour in super-huge chunks at once, generally, but we tour a lot in small chunks. We’ll go three days here, five days there, occasional 11 or 12-day tours, which is what we’ve been doing for the past five or six years, about 50 shows a year. That will require, no matter how much time you have of writing, if you don’t get to a certain point in the writing process, then you’ve got to start brushing up on your show material for tour, it kind of puts a delay on the writing process. But yeah, that’s part of the reason it took four years to get this damn record to come out, that right there. But we’ve kind of improved upon our writing process, whereby now we have this big eight-foot-by-four-foot dry-erase board and all our parts – we’ve got eight different songs we’re working on – and all the parts are written out. Not the music, but the parts are given names and what we’re going to do with them, like “1A,” “2A,” “4B,” and that kind of thing are written on there. We didn’t start doing that until we finished writing this record. We were practicing at that warehouse, and there was a big whiteboard in the dumpster, and we thought, “Why don’t we put this up and start writing on it and maybe it’ll help us remember what we’re supposed to be doing when we get back to it after three months of being on tour and someone being out of town.” So now everything’s up on this whiteboard, and we can go back through our various practice tapes and remember more readily what we’re doing. So yeah, we’re in the middle of writing. I hope we end up with a lot written in the next six months. I’d like it to be not too terrible long before we put something else out.

And in the meantime, I know you’re coming north for a couple shows. Brooklyn, Pittsburgh and a few others.

Right now, we’ve got 17 dates in April and May, and another four we’re working on in June – maybe another short tour in June – and then summer’s a question mark right now. We’re still trying to figure out what we’re going to do show-wise. We’re gonna go to New Orleans for a five-day trip, New York for a three-day trip, Atlanta, Athens, Richmond and all sorts of places. East Coast, New York City down, then we’re going to Chicago and Pittsburgh, and we haven’t been there in a while. We’re doing a fair amount of traveling in the next couple months.

I guess that plays into trying to balance the writing and the touring.

Yeah. We’ve done alright. The only real casualty of that is how long it takes to get something done. We’re all settled on that. We know that we don’t want it to take another four years before we put another record out, because hell, I’m 38 and how many times am I going to let four years go by before I put another record out? Shit could add up and you might not end up living all that terrible long (laughs). I hope that we end up working smoothly on what we’re doing now, and we’ll see what we end up putting out. I’d kind of be into putting out something smaller, a 10” or a 7” or a split 10” or something like that with somebody, but we’ll have to see what ends up happening, what’ sort of offers come up.

I know you did that run of shows, maybe a year ago at this point, with Hull and Batillus. I was wondering what for you is the kinship between what Caltrop is doing and what those guys are doing?

I only know the guys in that Batillus band from those couple of shows, so it’s not something I should really speak to, but Hull, we’ve played with those guys on and off for several years, and they’ve basically become really good friends. Like brothers. We really enjoy playing with them. We enjoy touring with them when we get the opportunity, meeting up in various locations across the country, playing with them here or them playing with us up in Brooklyn. I guess the kinship I would say is we’re all working at trying to put out really good music. I like their latest record, and I like all their music. I love watching them play live, and I’ve watched those fellas develop and I think they’re really good. They have been and are a really good band. I like what they do. I think that their songs are a little bit more longform, so you can make that relationship between us and them in certain circumstances, but it’s more just dudes that get along and have the same feelings about different things. That’s probably about as good an answer as I can give with that.

Caltrop’s website

Holidays for Quince

That structure is also something of an anomaly in terms of how it sets up the album. The model would seem to be a vinyl split between side A and B, but the flow works best in a linear sense – on a CD or digital format, in other words – where one modus immediately follows the next. Appropriately enough, it’s also the centerpiece track, “True to Say,” acting as the turning point in Crystal Head’s methodology, and where it and the five tracks preceding total 17:40, the five that follow hit 24:52, making the break between sides less cleanly perceptible. They don’t seem confused about it at all, blazing and swaggering their way through under-three-minute early cuts like “Jeremiad,” “Wouldn’t You Know” and the instrumental “The Fox,” which build on the model set forth by “Perfect Weirdo” of paramount hooks and engaging nods at their influences, the most clearly prevalent of which is Queens of the Stone Age. Even on the chorus of “Perfect Weirdo,” Cameron works a Josh Homme-style moan into his delivery, and that comes up elsewhere on the album as well, to excellent effect. “Freeloader” is more aggressive, and probably a specific person lyrically, but vague enough in the tradition of Filter’s “Hey Man Nice Shot” to be applicable in its tale of “the death of an alcoholic,” as Cameron croons in the opening line. The chorus is mean like Meantime-era Helmet and the vocals come across likewise rougher, but the first sense of the skillful craft put into Crystal Head’s arrangements comes through when Deal joins Cameron for an extended verse later into the song. It’s a subtle touch, but just enough to indicate the meticulousness that goes into making something sound so easy. As to Cameron’s Homme-isms, they’re manifold and show up sometimes in the start-stop guitar, but like the rest of the band’s directly-attributable elements, they’re put to work in a context that renders them fresher than perhaps might come across in a review picking them out and analyzing on a track-by-track basis. This is another way the speed with which Crystal Head’s first six songs play out helps them. They’re over before you know what’s hit you.

Both “Jeremiad” and “Wouldn’t You Know” follow an accessible course that finds Cameron working rhythmic lead lines on top of the strong heavy grooves from the Deals. Forward push is never sacrificed in either, even as “Wouldn’t You Know” turns its two-part chorus into something of a curve, making sub-psychedelic delivers of the single line “Pull me into Wonderland” one of Crystal Head’s most lasting moments. Taken on its own, neither is the pinnacle of the record, but they serve their purpose fittingly and rush the listener through to the next jab. The swagger in “Wouldn’t You Know” bleeds well into “The Fox,” which isn’t really long enough to be indulgent, but works efficiently to highlight a short build, in turn serving as the lead-in for “True to Say.” Deal’s bass rumble and subsequent progressive complexity is the first hint of a Tool influence that comes again later on closer “Night of Broken Glass,” and the transition into “True to Say” alone makes it. And for its part, “True to Say” is probably the highlight of the album. Cameron works in some piano alongside his guitar and is at his most Homme-ian vocally and riff-wise. Electronic drums start out, but Deal soon picks up the beat, and the song is both a party and somewhat sinister, Cameron going falsetto in the chorus for “true” and repeating “to say” à la Nirvana’s “Breed.” The transition back to the verse is a thundering slowdown, and it’s the first indication that Crystal Head have a speed in them other than “go,” however quickly they pick back up with the next verse. The groove also serves as the outro, which makes the shift to the more subdued start of “Truth Hurts” smoother. At 5:40, it’s the longest song so far by almost two full minutes, and the quiet verse gives Crystal Head their first real opportunity to show a dynamic sensibility as the louder guitars kick in for the chorus. Deal and Cameron share vocals effectively on that chorus, the lines “Careful what you wish for/What you wish for is coming true,” sitting well on the lumbering groove, as Cameron moves to a Maynard James Keenan-style shout to emphasize each “what you.” A quiet guitar solo break is as close as Crystal Head come to jamming, and though it never loses its sense of purpose, the notion is made plain that the band are operating on a different wavelength than they were just five minutes earlier.

Still, it’s not awkward, even as they move further into melancholic minimalism with the near-Radiohead levels of quiet that “Hookem-Snivey” brings about. Deal handles the acoustic guitar and Cameron the wistful moans, and Dean works in some lighter percussion behind. It’s a setup, of course. The start-stop thrust of “Mad Dog” lands heavier-footed for the lead-in it gets, and the swagger of Crystal Head’s early stretch returns, even if the song is still longer than everything else in the first six tracks save for “Freeloader,” and it comes through in both the jangle of the guitar and the air push of Deal’s toms. It’s more brash than posturing as masculine, but it ends with a bark, and that always strikes as trite, though with as fast as “First and Last” gets underway, it’s hard to hold it against them. Cameron goes back to putting his lead lines to work as rhythm tracks while Deal fills out behind, and verse seems to be the payoff, or at least the next stage of “Mad Dog”‘s sexualized throb. The chorus is hard pop worthy of Foo Fighters, and though neither “Mad Dog” nor “First and Last” fully return the kind of momentum the first several tracks were able to achieve, with 7:22 closer “Night of Broken Glass” following, neither were they trying to – the album’s progression was meant to end somewhere other than the place it began. “Night of Broken Glass” is sprawling compared to everything that’s come before it, Jon working in his best bass fills and Dean channeling his inner Danny Carey for some impressive tom work playing off an oddly-timed start-stop guitar line and consistent bass in the back half of the song. There’s a brief payoff and then feedback cuts out to end the album, Crystal Head wasting no time to tell what they’ve already shown – namely that their breadth of influence isn’t limited to the mainstays of what’s commonly called stoner rock and that they’re able even on their first record (they’ve reportedly been together a while and operated under several other names) to hone a personality that’s both individual and familiar to their audience. Even though one might recognize some of the pieces from which the album is constructed, I have a hard time coming up with an argument against heavy rock songs that are this well-written, and I look forward to keeping with Crystal Head as they continue down the fascinating creative path they’ve set for themselves with these tracks. Recommended.

Crystal Head’s website

Crystal Head on Thee Facebooks

This is a record I heard about on the forum a bit ago but never really had the chance to write on. Amplified Heat are in the top four of the most incredible live acts I’ve ever seen, and of all the bands I’ve ever managed to catch live, they’re the one who most seemed like the only reason they started a band was because someone told them they could get chicks if they did so. I don’t know if they did or not, but okay.

Rest assured, the song I’ve had stuck in my head from the Austin, Texas, trio’s On the Hunt effort has been “Dirty Love No Romance,” but the video was for “Give it to Me,” so I feel like I’m no one to argue. In any case, Amplified Heat‘s Blue Cheer fetish comes across clearly, and that’s pretty much the point, so far as I can tell. One way or another, On the Hunt is devastatingly memorable, and a record I was glad to have picked up when I did. Better late than never, and so forth.

Podcasts aside, I’m loathe to post on the weekends, but I’ll have that Caltrop interview posted probably on Sunday. The Patient Mrs.’ brother is getting married tomorrow. After the rehearsal dinner tonight, I put on Kyuss‘s ..And the Circus Leaves Town and thought of Rock ‘n’ Roll Gina Brooks, whose tumors I’ve too often at this point internalized. There’s a longer story at this point, and I may tell it eventually, but maybe not. It depends on time.

Time, at this point, is something of which I don’t have much. I’d wanted to do that “The Canon of Heavy” post this week, and I didn’t, and there was other stuff too. Bit of a bummer. Anyway, stay tuned for that other interview, and next week, I’ll have reviews of Crystal Head and others. Worth checking back in for, if you weren’t sure.

Thanks to all who checked in. I hope you have a relaxing evening and that you’ll stop by over the weekend. I’ll be here as much as I can, what will the festivities and all. In any case, thanks much and good fun to come. My conscious head is mixing with dreams, so I’m gonna go to bed. Hope you have a great and safe weekend.