https://www.high-endrolex.com/18

The Re-Stoned, Analog: Finding the Inner Fuzz

Posted in Reviews on June 29th, 2011 by JJ Koczan

If it feels like there’s been a lot of instrumental heavy psych reviewed around here lately, you’re right. Joining the pack with their second studio full-length on R.A.I.G. (they also had a live album out) is previously On-the-Radar’ed Moscow trio The Re-Stoned, whose latest seven-track collection of wah-jam voodoo is called Analog. A lot of what you need to know about the band and the album is right there. As their moniker might lead you to believe, they’re stoned again – playing a kind of heady guitar-led stoner/psych rock – and they’re not at all shy about highlighting the analog warmth of the cuts included; calling it Analog feels almost brazen, daring the listener to take on the album’s natural feel. And in so doing, one is making a considerable investment in both time and energy. The three-piece cover a wide swath of mostly familiar ground on Analog, and with opener “Northern Lights” as the shortest piece at 5:58 and closer “Dream of Vodyanoy” the longest at 14:01, the record clocks a robust 61 and a half minutes, which is a lot and feels like it.

Immediately that’s a kind of drawback for The Re-Stoned. “Fronted” in a musical sense by heavily-effected, Orange-amped guitarist Ilya Lipkin, Analog takes shape around classic psych jams like “Crystals,” and while the bluesy favor in Lipkin’s playing is often satisfying as offset by the double-Vladimir rhythm section of Vladimir Nikulin (bass) and Vladimir Muchnov (drums), as “Crystals” turns into “Feedback” turns into “Music for Jimmy” and the album’s middle becomes its end, the course of jam parts, the occasional plotted riff and extended solos starts to feel samey, in concept if not actual sound. The Re-Stoned recorded Analog live, which was undoubtedly the way to go considering the spontaneous vibe of the material, and in multiple sessions, and one can hear that mostly in Muchnov’s drums, which have an entirely different snare sound on the title-track than they do on the riffier “Put the Sound Down or Get the Hell Out.” And while this change in the actual audio keeps Analog from sounding overly redundant, there’s no denying the ethic is the same. That said, “Analog” blends the more riff-led and jammier elements in The Re-Stoned’s approach better than nearly everything else on the album, so it’s not like Analog is lacking in satisfying moments or is somehow entirely without merit or appeal. Just the opposite.

Read more »

Tags: , , ,

Without God, Lambs to the Slaughter: Drawn to the Sound of Broken Glass

Posted in Reviews on May 24th, 2011 by JJ Koczan

Though both their band moniker and album title smack of grindcore or some form of metal more typically thought of as “extreme,” Moscow outfit Without God’s debut, Lambs to the Slaughter, is doom and sludge the whole way through. The first offering from the four-piece (who may or may not have gotten their name from the Katatonia song), Lambs to the Slaughter finds its release through R.A.I.G., perhaps the most major of players in the still-developing Russian heavy/riff-led scene – that’s not to say “stoner,” because it’s not all stoner rock, though those elements are present in many of R.A.I.G.’s bands (The Re-Stoned and The Grand Astoria come to mind), Without God among them. But the 10 cuts on Lambs to the Slaughter are darker, more doomed atmospherically, and among the band’s influences — readily on display in various stretches throughout the album – the Californian desert is all but completely inconsequential. Without God are shooting for something altogether more tonally weighted, and about as close as they come is some similarity early on between vocalist/guitarist Anton Brovkin and former The Awesome Machine singer John Hermansen’s guttural croon on opener “They Rot.”

I’d chalk that up to coincidence more than influence, and rather, it seems the actual intent of Without God is to play off a Crowbar-style riffy sludge, throw in some melody – as both Brovkin and fellow guitarist Olga Grieg do effectively in the instrumental breaks of “They Rot” – and write traditionally structured heavy songs. Noble enough intent, and they’re not bad at it. Small flourishes of individuality go a long way toward complementing the more genre-based ideas on Lambs to the Slaughter, and a string of slower, bluesy guitar leads across several of the tracks — “Believe,” “Crossroads/Eat the Shit,” “Forgiveness Sunday,” “Altar of Medicine,” and closer “Faithless” – shows personality in the playing that’s still only beginning to emerge. Crowbar is the chief influence on much of Lambs to the Slaughter, whether it’s a slower song like “Altar of Medicine” or a faster one like “Homeless,” but they’re by no means the only point of inspiration on display. Brovkin’s vocal cadence on the awesomely-named “Space Weed” is pure Lee Dorrian from Cathedral’s classic “Hopkins (The Witchfinder General),” and you can’t get away with putting the exclamation “Alright now!” over a grooving riff as he does on “Believe” without earning a comparison to Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf.” Especially not over that grooving riff.

Read more »

Tags: , , ,

El Hijo de la Aurora, Wicca: Las Brujos de Lima

Posted in Reviews on April 27th, 2011 by JJ Koczan

The hardest part about listening to Peruvian experimental doomers El Hijo de la Aurora is trying to imagine whether their mysterious musical concoctions were crafted in a darkened science laboratory amid bubbling vials of green and blue liquid, or in a pagan forest amidst animal skulls and unspoken heathen rites. If the cover and general atmosphere of the Lima trio’s second full-length (first for R.A.I.G.), Wicca: Spells, Magic and Witchcraft Through the Ages, is anything to go buy, it’s probably the latter, but given some of the bizarre turns and villainous twists contained within these eight tracks (there are nine listed on the back of the disc, but eight show up when I put it in my player), I’m still not sure. Something about this kind of stuff just seethes with malefic and haunting forethought.

El Hijo de la Aurora — which boasts drummer and effects-master Joaquin Cuadra (who also produced here) and bassist Manolo Garfias (also guitar), formerly of Don Juan Matus alongside vocalist Rafael Cantoni – made their full-length debut with last year’s avant drone outing, Lemuria (review here). What the two records have in common, aside from dense atmospherics and a foreboding throughout, is a slew of guest appearances. Wicca engineer Saul Cornejo shows up on Hammond for the later shuffling rocker “Akasha,” Marcos Coifman wrote the lyrics to that song, and takes vocals on it and “Vril,” which follows, Tania Duarte sings on the shorter acoustic closer “Cuentos de Bosque Encantado Part II,” as she sang on the finale of Lemuria, and there are numerous other appearances as well on theremin, Hammond, Moog and vocals. A big difference between Lemuria and Wicca is the inclusion of Cantoni as a uniting vocal factor throughout at least several if not most of the tracks, and as Wicca is less barren and instrumentally drone-based, I’d say there’s been a shift in songwriting approach as well.

That shouldn’t be surprising, given the avant and openly creative feel El Hijo de la Aurora showed on the debut, but the raw Sabbathian doom definitely comes to the fore from the start of Wicca with opener “Der Golem,” which I think is combined with the sampled intro “El Ojo Hipnotico” (“The Hypnotic Eye”) to get the track listing/disc disparity. The song starts with Cuadra on drums setting a mid-tempo plod for Garfias to follow on the riff before Cantoni rides the groove vocally. All told, Wicca is a more active-feeling album than what Lemuria, but nothing feels sacrificed in terms of ambience, and the blend of classic riffage and doom that El Hijo de la Aurora proffered there remains one of the strongest assets here. In the hands of a band less capable of affecting a mood, “Psicodrama” might just come off as stoner rock, but El Hijo de la Aurora make the song more than the sum of its riffs, setting up the massive 14-minute “Libro de las Sombras (Including Dios Astado & el Escrito)” like the person who bends down behind you while someone in front pushes you over. Just when you think you know what to expect from El Hijo de la Aurora, they change it on you.

Read more »

Tags: , , ,

Distorted Space and Literary Appreciation with The Grand Astoria

Posted in Reviews on August 10th, 2010 by JJ Koczan

With their origins in the chilly Russian climes of Saint Petersburg, The Grand Astoria are bound to bring something unique to their take on stoner rock, and sure enough, with their appropriately-titled second offering, II (R.A.I.G.), they do just that, eschewing a fuzzy sound for a harsher, noisier distorted jamming that occasionally goes full-cosmic. While some of the material on last year’s self-released self-titled effort seemed punkish, II comes from a less hurried place and shows The Grand Astoria as unafraid to experiment within their sound, adding samples or feedback to the mostly instrumental material as a way of engaging their audience.

Immediately noticeable about II is the way it’s organized. In terms of track length, the five songs that comprise the album would make a ‘U’ were you to graph them. Opener “Enjoy the View” reaches furthest at 14:50, then the cumbersomely-named “The Inner Galactic Experience of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath” (Plath was referenced on the self-titled as well) clocks in at 7:40. “Visit Sri Lanka” gives a Siena Root-esque moment of Subcontinental Asian influence at 2:44, then it’s back to the longer material with “Wikipedia Surfer” at 9:02 and closer “Radio Friendly Fire” at 12:18. What was behind The Grand Astoria arranging the tracks this way I don’t know, but II does have a rich and smooth flow to it and “Visit Sri Lanka” breaks up the surrounding tracks in a way as to make the second half of the album as refreshing as the first, so no complaints.

Read more »

Tags: , , ,

On the Radar: The Re-Stoned

Posted in On the Radar on July 22nd, 2010 by JJ Koczan

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: , , ,