1000mods Retrospective Pt. 1: Super Van Vacation & Vultures
Posted in audiObelisk, Features on June 21st, 2023 by JJ Koczan
This Friday, Greek heavy rock forerunners 1000mods will reissue their first and second albums on Heavy Psych Sounds in the US as preface to the band returning to American shores in September to play among the featured international acts at Desertfest New York.
For more than the last decade, 1000mods have been at the head of a generational wave of underground heavy rock acts from Greece. The Chiliomodi outfit have four full-lengths to their credit, and starting with 2011’s Super Van Vacation — preceded by 2007’s Blank Reality and 2009’s Liquid Sleep (review here) EPs — 1000mods very soon became the international face of Greek heavy. Supported by a vehement local scene that showed up on European radar as ‘the party you’ve all been missing, already in progress,’ 1000mods photos and videos from Athens and in other spots throughout Greece showed packed venues, passionate fans, and largely in the wake of 1000mods, an entire league of bands has come up in the years since, varied in sound but only benefitting from the trailblazing work the four-piece of Dani G., Giannis S., Giorgos T. and Labros G. have already put in. Greek heavy, European heavy, would not be what it is without them.
2011’s Super Van Vacation and 2014’s Vultures — also 2016’s Repeated Exposure To… and 2020’s Youth of Dissent, which we’ll get to next week — are landmarks in the development of one of the most essential rock bands ever from Greece. 1000mods not only put out these albums, but specifically set themselves to the task of hand-delivering them throughout Europe on persistent, lengthy tours. As the band looks ahead to coming back to the US, these catalog reissues — out this and next week — we’ll be revisiting their discography to take a look at the evolution of 1000mods‘ sound as well as some of the influence they’ve had and continue to have on others in and outside of Greece.
Best place to start is the start, so let’s get started:
Super Van Vacation (2011)
Let’s not mince words, the only thing stopping these songs from being classics is not enough time has passed. Comprised of 10 tracks and running 65 minutes of Billy Anderson-produced — also George Leodis, who would become the band’s go-to engineer — and deeply enviable, casually sauntering desert rock tonality, Super Van Vacation is a love letter to its own riffs, to groove and the particular spirit of freedom that comes with losing oneself in a heavy song.
Tracks like “El Rollito,” the lumbering “Track Me,” opener/longest cut (immediate points) “Road to Burn,” the lead-guitar-peppered open space of “Vidage,” and the propulsive fuzz shuffle of the closing “Super Van Vacation” show breadth between them, but 1000mods aren’t coy in terms of style. They’re playing desert rock down to its very roots, a warm-toned riff at the foundation of gutted-out, grown-up punk and metal together, able to be mellow or a party or a purposeful comedown into the next build-up all in the span of a few measures, but holding to an ethic of superficial simplicity, of primeval riff communion, their grooves speaking to some buried part of genetic memory that once danced around fires in an open savannah, the galaxy a blazing bar across the sky overhead.
Like Dozer‘s In the Tail of a Comet in Sweden and (Los) Natas‘ Delmar in Argentina, Super Van Vacation is an album that firmly declared to the world outside Greece that not only could desert rock exist there, but that work could be produced that would add to the genre and move it forward. They were the vanguard for what has flourished as one of Europe’s most vital hotbeds, with Athens as an epicenter. And not only that, putting aside all the ‘it’s an important album’ blah blah blah — all of which is true, mind you; crucial album and if you don’t own it, you should, regardless of where you live — but it’s also a great listen.
Not too many bands come out of the gate with a double-LP and manage to pull it off, but the deeper you go into “Johny’s” or the wah swagger of “Abell 1835,” the more 1000mods have to offer. Yes, the Kyuss influence is all over the record from guitar and bass tones to the clenched-gut behind the vocals of accompanying the wall-push of “Set You Free” or the wonderfully hooky “7 Flies,” but already in the material, 1000mods were beginning to sculpt their own take that their subsequent years of touring would refine and expand. So not only is Super Van Vacation one of the most fundamental European heavy rock releases of the 2010s, but it’s one that holds up, and if you haven’t heard it before, it still stands ready to be the soundtrack of the best summer of your life.
First released through Kozmik Artifactz and CTS Productions in 2011, reissues and new pressings would follow through CTS and the band’s own Ouga Booga and the Mighty Oug Recordings around 2016 and 2021. The Heavy Psych Sounds version is the first specifically pressed for North American distribution. And yes, I’m aware both albums are already streaming in their entirety. These are new versions, and if there’s a chance they might catch the ears of someone who hasn’t heard them before and make their day better or easier somehow, it’s worth it to me to host them. Whatever your experience, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
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Vultures (2014)
The sophomore full-length from 1000mods did not have an easy task before it, but Vultures learned valuable lessons from its predecessor. In terms of confidence in their approach, the eight-song/38-minute long-player took the appropriated aspects of Super Van Vacation and further internalized their influences, making their sound that much more their own. Co-produced by the band with George Leodis, who also mixed (Tolis Economou mastered), Vultures is comfortable engaging the heavy blues of “Horses’ Green,” and almost immediately on “Claws,” it is specifically an album about movement, and very much the work of a touring band.
From the shouts driving the chorus of leadoff “Claws” through the build into its side B counterpart “Low” and even the outbound cosmic thrust and spoken repetitions of the title in the jamming back half of closer “Reverb of the New World” — which, god damn I hope they play at Desertfest — the songs on <emVultures feel written for the stage, for a live audience. They are a little shorter, accordingly, perhaps more structurally direct, and tighter in their rhythm. While Super Van Vacation had the element of surprise on its side and a ‘check out what these crazy kids are up to’ energy, Vultures codified that and made it sustainable for 1000mods, giving them a model of their sound to reshape as they took the songs out on the road.
And they did most certainly do that. A listen through and you could snag any number of examples, but I’m not sure any single track is as much a summary of the argument as “Big Beatiful” (sic) with its Queen lyrical reference and the kind of groove that, an album earlier, 1000mods might have dwelt in longer, but that on Vultures trades that hypnotic chill effect for a live-style urgency. Sure, these things are relative and one could just as easily look at the patient start of “Reverb of the New World” for counterargument — and I wish someone would, frankly; I’m getting tired of talking to myself about this stuff — but even that last song is shorter than it might’ve been two or three years before, and the energy it hones carries into the aforementioned blues of “She” and the build-up of “Horses’ Green,” which doesn’t even have time for its own payoff.
Instead, it cleverly lets the vibe-heavy fade-in of “Low” reset, go back to ground, and start all over. And it works, because 1000mods are songwriters at heart, and Vultures not only confirms that, but finds them already pushing themselves to progress, to do the thing they do in the way they want to do it. The record has plenty of space, plenty of atmosphere — I’m not telling you otherwise — but in its ebbs and flows, in the vitality of the performances contained on it, it’s always been the band-on-tour record to my ears, and it’s just fortunate they stopped doing shows long enough to make it. Either way, it was clear the beast they were becoming was alive, with eyes open. Hungry.
The LP of Vultures was released through The Lab Records, with the CD through Ouga Booga and the Mighty Oug, which also handled reissues in 2015 and 2022 in Greece. Once again, the Heavy Psych Sounds version is the first not to be an ‘import,’ which if you’ve bought a record from Europe and paid shipping — or if you’re in Europe and you’ve paid shipping from the US — you already know matters again after not really mattering for a while there while the world was flatter and less fascist.
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And we could go on about social issues in Greece, greater Europe, the US, etc., but that’s part of the story for next time. Stay tuned next week for the second part of this retrospective, featuring the albums Repeated Exposure To… and Youth of Dissent. Thanks for reading.
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