I’ve been racking my brain to try and understand why North Carolinian psychedelic progsters US Christmas (I’ve also seen it as U.S. Christmas, with punctuation, but on the album it’s without and I prefer it that way anyhow) have such a buzz around them. Musically, the six-piece don’t really do anything that’s never been done before, adding some Appalachian ruggedness to the well-established tropes of modern psych and post-rock, but I don’t think they satisfy in either their meandering structures or most spacious moments any need that acts like Naam, Quest for Fire, Farflung, Sula Bassana, and a dozen others don’t already fulfill. Seriously, I’ve been through and through US Christmas’ fifth album, Run Thick in the Night (Neurot), and the only reason I can come up with for why US Christmas has received all this hype and these other bands haven’t is because Scott Kelly likes them. Apparently that makes all the difference in the world.

Not that I wouldn’t also seek to curry favor from the venerable Neurosis guitarist and vocalist for a musical project, and not that this is anything to be held against US Christmas in terms of their sound or the quality of Run Thick in the Night as both a whole album and collection of songs, but clearly these things matter. Since Neurot released US Christmas’ Eat the Low Dogs in 2008, I feel like a shitload of people have grasped onto the band in a big way as torchbearers for modern space-driven psychedelia, and don’t get me wrong, Run Thick in the Night has its moments — at 76 minutes long, there’d better be a couple in there — and the band has ironed out some of its kitchen-sink approach (lineup changes are also a factor), but in terms of crafting memorable songs, US Christmas seem to take more of a part-construction point of view, making tracks that flow well enough but don’t necessarily stay with you after listening.

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