I’ve sat with the new VALIS record, Dark Matter (Small Stone) for a couple days now, ever since I posted the mp3 of opener “Resurrection Sickness” a little while ago, and the only two words I keep going back to for it are “catchy” and “stoned.” Guitarist/vocalist Van Conner, once bassist for Screaming Trees, has outdone himself in stripping away a lot of the spaced-out confusion that pervaded past Small Stone albums, 2004’s Head Full of Pills and the next year’s Champions of Magic, and where those albums had a hazy, heady, tripped out feel, Dark Matter is much closer to the ground — “closer” being the key word there.

Since each track on the album has a remarkably distinct personality, the best way to analyze Dark Matter seems to be one song at a time:

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