I’ve listened to it front to back and I can honestly say this is the best podcast I’ve made in the last five months. Truth be told, I know there are plenty of people who do podcasts as their primary outlet, talk on them and whatnot (hey, I tried it once and reserve the right to do it again at some point), but if it’s between crossfading feedback from one song to another and writing a review of a new record, well, crossfading falls into the same category as just about everything else: Write first.
Fortunately, a longer span of time between casts makes it that much easier to pick tracks. Existence does not hand you a 45-minute Øresund Space Collective jam every day, so I thought that was worth featuring, and I just got Megaritual’s new vinyl for review, so I thought featuring their more recent single-song EP would work well too.
I’m happy with the blend overall, and with Asteroid setting the tone. Be patient with it. Let it unfold. Even with a rocking start, it gets pretty psychedelic pretty quickly, and only continues to move further out. My advice is go with it and see where you end up.
As always, I hope you enjoy.
Track details follow:
First Hour:
0:00:00 Asteroid, “Them Calling” from III
0:05:02 Stinkeye, “Orange Man” from Llantera Demos
0:08:31 Hornss, “Prince of a Thousand Enemies” from Telepath
0:11:36 Ice Dragon, “Broken Life” from Broken Life
0:16:08 Wasted Theory, “Odyssey of the Electric Warlock” from Defenders of the Riff
0:20:59 Pelander, “True Colour” from Time
0:29:41 The Freeks, “Blow Time Away” from Shattered
0:34:26 Baby Woodrose, “Freedom” from Freedom
0:37:27 Comacozer, “The Mind that Feeds the Eye” from Astra Planeta
0:45:21 Mos Generator, “Outlander” from The Firmament
0:51:13 Megaritual, “Eclipse” from Eclipse
Second Hour:
1:16:25 Øresund Space Collective, “Visions Of…” from Visions Of…
Posted in Reviews on November 16th, 2016 by JJ Koczan
It’s only been about 18 months since Ice Dragon put out their last album, A Beacon on the Barrow (review here), but one wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to think of that as an eternity when it comes to the self-releasing Boston experimentalist doom rockers. After all, that record — which was the only thing they had out last year — capped a three-year period from 2012 to 2015 that saw Ice Dragon issue no fewer than eight full-lengths, starting with Tome of the Future Ancients (review here), Dream Dragon (review here), greyblackfalconhawk (review here) and Dead Friends and Angry Lovers (which wasn’t an Ice Dragon release, then it was) in 2012, Born a Heavy Morning (review here) in 2013, and Seeds from a Dying Garden (review here) and Loaf of Head (review here) in 2014. Peppered in with these were splits and shorter releases, one-off singles rife with studio fuckery, willfully trashcan sound and the band trying to dig heavy metal, psychedelic rock and/or garage doom down to their very core rawness, thereby remaking them in their own image.
What started as barebones crunch on their 2007 self-titled (review here) and 2010’s The Burl, the Earth, the Aether (review here) exploded into an anti-genre creative streak that simply refused to falter or not move itself forward, even if that motion was happening through regression. And make no mistake, there were plenty of times when it was. Recording themselves at Ron’s Wrecker Service, Ice Dragon developed a signature in the sometimes harsh production they elicited, but it was no less a part of their aesthetic on the Beach Boysian Born a Heavy Morning than it was on 2012’s patient and proggy single, Season of Decay (discussed here), or the return to doom in the 2013 two-tracker Steel Veins b/w Queen of the Black Harvest (review here). It was a part of who they were as a band.
Then they stopped. Bound to happen eventually, right? It would be unreasonable to ask a group to keep up the kind of pace Ice Dragon were working at into perpetuity. Vocalist Ron Rochondo worked on various side-projects, while drummer Brad played bass in Pilgrim, and presumably guitarist/bassist Carter and bassist/guitarist Joe were at work on something or other — maybe life. In any case, Ice Dragon awaken with the new EP Broken Life. Comprised of just two songs, “Scratch at Your Skin” and “Life Means Nothing, Death Means Nothing,” it’s nonetheless the first new output the band has had since A Beacon on the Barrow and so feels like an event in its arrival, even as that comes just through their usual means of posting on Bandcamp as a name-your-price download. In fact, there’s a lot about Broken Life that’s business-as-usual for Ice Dragon, including its unpredictability. After 18 months, who the hell would guess they were going to come up with anything at all, let alone take a stab at what that might actually sound like? Not me.
Further, most of the recording seems to have been done at Rubber Tracks Studio in Boston, which is either owned by or somehow affiliated with shoemaker Converse. They still mixed and mastered at Ron’s Wrecker Service, and recorded vocals and some acoustic guitar there as well, but that’s a significant change in venue for an Ice Dragon offering. Would Broken Life had happened in another circumstance, i.e., without the push of putting it to tape someplace else? I don’t know the circumstances that led to their revival anymore than I do what led to their break, but when it comes to new material, I’ll take it either way. Which brings us around to “Scratch at Your Skin” and “Life Means Nothing, Death Means Nothing.” Together, they run just under 11 minutes. If they’d fit they’d make an excellent 7″ pressing — particularly with the Samantha Allen cover art out front — and in their short span of time they manage to reaffirm what made Ice Dragon‘s prolific stretch so satisfying, most of all that part about always moving forward.
Production, as it turns out, is a factor in that process. While Rochondo‘s howling lyrics in the first cut, “It’s killing you/But not quite yet,” may have been recorded at their home studio, the guitar tone that accompanies them, though still plenty raw, comes through bright and clear at the fore of the mix. I’d be willing to bet Baines Kluxen and Matt Carlson, who helmed the session at Rubber Tracks, had at least some measure of prior familiarity with the band going into the session, because they manage to preserve some of the core features of their sound in the guitar, bass and far-back crash of the drums, while enhancing the overall feel. Vocals echo cavernous over a march in the second half where the title line is delivered in a context outside its usual chorus, and “Scratch at Your Skin” rumbles and hums to a finish, leading to the more prominent bass roll of “Life Means Nothing, Death Means Nothing,” a classic doom rocker that seems to inadvertently come across like darker Kadavar in its verse before moving into a chorus capped with surprising harmonies and a guitar triumph that affects immediate nod before shifting into an acoustic stretch.
The heavier push reemerges after the four-minute mark and more prominent harmonies in the hook help carry Ice Dragon to the finish of the second and closing track. I don’t know a lot about this material — when it was written, how the recording came about, whether it will lead to more, etc. — but if Ice Dragon are marking a return with Broken Life, or even general intent toward one, or if it’s a happenstance one-off and they’ll melt back into the semi-psychedelic doom ooze from which they came, it’s secondary to the fact of how well these two songs work together and off each other. Again, if they wanted to press it, as a fan of the band, I wouldn’t argue, but even as a digital release, Broken Life would seem to signify there’s vitality in Ice Dragon yet. Maybe they won’t put out four albums a year, or even one, but if they do or don’t, it’s comforting to know their creativity and sonic individualism are still intact, for whenever or however often they might want to put them to use.
