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The Obelisk Radio Add of the Week: Smoke Pilot, Live in the Jam Room 2012 EP

Posted in Radio on January 23rd, 2013 by JJ Koczan

Actually, this should’ve been the Obelisk Radio’s Add of the Week for last week, since that’s when it went up and joined the playlist, but with all the server fuckery on the hosting company’s end and technical whathaveyou, I figured probably best to hold off highlighting it until there was a chance it might actually come up in the selection. As we seem to be back up and running, it’s a good time to point out the new Live in the Jam Room 2012 self-released EP from UK five-piece Smoke Pilot and all its dual-guitar riffing.

Back in the fall, I did a Buried Treasure post on the band Medamaki and their Warbird release. Smoke Pilot is all the same dudes (you might also notice it’s the same picture), just with a new name. The songwriting ethic seems also not to have changed much, and that works well for the four tracks on the Live in the Jam Room 2012 EP, the guitars of Rich Wright and Sean Bindy Philips leading the charge while the guttural-but-not-amelodic vocals of Max Ward add burl atop the fervent grooving. A strong bass performance from Shaun Webb and rocking sway in Paul Ford‘s drums makes the short offering a winner that should have no trouble finding friends amongst the heavy converted.

As the band lost some time prior to the name change, I’m hoping a full-length isn’t far behind the EP, as I’d be interested to hear how they develop their ideas over the course of a whole album. In the meantime though, Smoke Pilot‘s live EP engages in cask-ale fashion with inviting nod and little to distract it from the all-important business of rocking faces and a quality of recording that puts it well above most jam room demos. They’ve made it available as a pay-what-you-will download through the Smoke Pilot Bandcamp page, and here’s the stream as well to check out:

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Buried Treasure and the Boulders in the Mouth of God

Posted in Buried Treasure on September 10th, 2012 by JJ Koczan

Sometimes in life, you happen into albums. Sometimes, they happen into you, as was the case with Medamaki‘s Warbird EP and I. The UK five-piece released the four-track, 21-minute EP back in 2007 and then — well, okay, I don’t really know what, but let’s call it “half a decade” happened — and I ran into guitarist Sean Phillips at Stoner Hands of Doom XII two weekends ago and he very generously gave me a copy of the record. It’s a small scene and it’s full of very nice people everywhere you go. These things happen.

Medamaki have changed their name to the far more stonerly moniker Smoke Pilot, and that makes me somewhat curious to hear what their new material might sound like. Five years ago had them a burly double-guitar fivesome with standalone vocals from Max Ward, sharing more in common with Orange Goblin than their singer’s last name. The songs, whether it’s the thickened shuffle of the title-track or the surprising growls — almost death metal barks, never really sustained, but effective in conveying a more extreme past — from six-stringer Rich Wright on opener “Mouth of God,” “Solar Plexus” or closer “Poison the Well” (presumably not named for the post-hardcore band), are well written and catchy, with a production that’s newer school digital-sounding, but not lifeless as so many are and a vitality that I’d also be interested to hear how it’s held up half a decade later.

There’s a shift in the sound of the recording between “Warbird” and “Poison the Well” — you can hear mostly in drummer Paul Ford‘s snare and the prominence of Wright‘s backing vocals — but the Kyuss-isms in the verse of the final song carry across nonetheless, even with the more metal chorus and the more individualized melody in the chorus of the song prior. It’s an EP though, and from everything I can gather, it was the band’s first, so things like changes in production value are much less of a concern than they’d otherwise be, and I find I’m much more focused on the strength of the hooks in “Mouth of God,” which references Monster Magnet in its chorus (moving from the mouth to the spine) and talks about rolling boulders into god’s mouth, whatever that might mean, and “Solar Plexus,” which runs a quick seven minutes and seamlessly integrates a percussion-led jam in which all but bassist Shaun Webb and Wright take part — the former’s busy holding down the groove on bass, the latter ripping a solo — before swinging back around to the chorus one more time, hinting at a mindfulness of structure that presumably could only serve them well in whatever their next endeavor might finally prove to be.

Included on the CD are a photo gallery with a handful of out-of-focus-type shots of the band and a video for the song “Warbird” that, if it’s counting the number of cuts from one shot to another there on the bottom right (mind you I don’t know that it is), features over 210 of them. Pretty complex stuff, and probably their best song of the four to boot, so while we wait to find out what Smoke Pilot have in store, here’s the clip for “Warbird,” with my thanks to Phillips for passing along the material.

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