As a fan of the band, I’m sorry to see him go, but given the reasons he cites on the band’s blog, I’ll have a hard time holding it against him. On behalf of The Obelisk, we wish (now) former Dixie Witch badass guitarist Clayton Mills all the best and hope to hear his six-string wizardry soon. Here’s what he had to say about it:

After 10 years as the founding guitarist of Dixie Witch, I am leaving the band to concentrate on family for awhile. I know that there have been some word of mouth rumors circulating so I just want to set the record straight. My wife and I are having a child this summer and I’m going to stay at home and take care of business there for the time being. The band will continue to play shows and tour with a new guitarist and we’ll just have to play it by ear as to my involvement with Dixie Witch in the future. By no means am I getting out of music or quitting playing guitar for good or any bullshit like that. Ya’ll will be hearing from me and my Les Paul again! Its been a great decade of playing music with the Witch, we’ve been all over and played nearly 1,000 live shows since 2000 and I’m very grateful for the experience and career I’ve had with the band.

I’d really like to thank all of those who have supported us over the years! The list of names could go on and on forever so I’d just like to say thanks to all the fans who have come out to the shows and bought our CDs and merch, all the bands we’ve shared the stage with, all the family we’ve made on the road (especially those who have opened their homes to us!), all the bartenders for the extended hospitality and all the clubs and venues who have let us rock their stages. I’d like to say an extra special thanks to Tone Deaf Touring (Erik, Troy and Greg), webmaster Jeff Downing, Scott and Small Stone Records, John Perez and Brainticket Records, Mauro and Arclight Records, Erik Larson and ATP, Jeff Pinkus and Honky, Suplecs, Joel Hamilton, Klaus at the Vibra Agency in Europe, Greg Barrett from Emissions from the Monolith, Walter and the Roadburn festival, the Room 710, Emo’s Austin — and of course to Trinidad and CC for being the incredible musicians that they are! Its been quite the ride!!! We have two more shows coming up in Texas with our good ‘ol friends Honky — April 10th at the Continental Club in Houston and April 11th at Room 710 in Austin.

– Clayton

Well, my brain is fried, and I can think of no better band to go along with friend brains than Sleep. Five reviews later, here’s the video for “Dragonaut” from the all-time classic Sleep’s Holy Mountain. If you can’t get behind this, you’re on the wrong page.

It’s more than just a clever name — these dudes are seriously fucked up. Like “Set your phasers to ‘stoned.'” So high that when the album showed up the cover was sideways. Really, really, really high. That’s apparently their thing.

I always wonder what bands like this say to their parents. Granted, I’m pretty sure Jesse D’Stills (drums), TJ Whippets (guitar), Tommy Blow (bass) and Woody High (guitar/vocals) are using stage names, but even so, when mom calls and asks how the band is, does Tommy Blow answer, “Well ma, we’re really fucking high. How’s dad?” I sure hope so, because that would be awesome, and Mrs. Blow would never see it coming.

Mighty High do one thing and do it well. Their brand of junkie punk encompasses a narrow scope and even “T.S. Eliot” is about getting high and fucking shit up. On last year’s debut, …In Drug City (released through their own Mint Deluxe Tapes), they come off like a druggier (obviously) Easy Action, and Woody has a regional aggression in his voice more fitting the band’s New York City home than their penchant for killing brain cells. As songs like “Dusted,” “Hooked on Drugs,” “Stone Gett-Off,” “Buy the Pound,” “Mighty High,” the title track, “Albert Hofmann” and “I Live to Get High” would suggest, they know what they like and they stick to it. As they say in the aforementioned closer “T.S. Eliot,” “You don’t like it?/So what?/We do/Tough fucking shit.” It may not have made the cut as a basis for foreign policy throughout this decade, but coming from Mighty High — who, like the guy being dragged out by security dangling a Ziplock baggie full of green nuggets, “aren’t hurting anyone, man” — it’s positively charming.

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El P?ramo hablan del desierto. Actually, they don’t “hablan” (or whatever the correct verb form is; apologies for my ignorance of the beautiful Spanish language) at all, they’re instrumental. But musically, their free-flowing jams and Colour Hazey tones point the way to wind-carved dunes that stretch for miles. The Madrid four-piece, whose name translates to The Wasteland, offer a simple take on desert rock but don’t go as far as ripping anyone off. Their influences are easily discernable — Colour Haze and Kyuss being principle — but the seven tracks on their Alone Records self-titled debut boast a warmth and character that’s all their own.

Santi, Santi, Jorge and David (drums, bass, guitar and guitar, respectively) offer their ’70s psych wares in a variety of packages, be it the expanse of opener “Varicela,” which at 11:53 does more than merely set the tone for the rest of El P?ramo or the heavier, riffier, “Sirope de Arena,” which follows “La Benedici?n de Eolo,” a track that eases the transition by combining jamming with more straight ahead guitar work.

As ever with roots stoner rock, and even more so with the European variety than with their US counterparts who will try anything to avoid the label, El P?ramo don’t necessarily branch out much from the well established parameters of the style sound-wise — that is, they’re not bringing in unexpected instrumentation or off-the-wall timing — but as the Los Natas-esque lines that run through the early part of “Infecci?n de Escorpi?n” sweetly ring out, the lack of pretentiousness alone is enough to carry the song. It’s a rare genre that’s so approachable? that bands can get together and release albums purely because they love the music. The vibe I get from El P?ramo is that they are as much saluting the masters of the style as they are emulating them.

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Wilmington, North Carolina-based Gollum would be at home in the class of genre-fucking grinders coming out of Chicago if it weren’t for a distinctive Southern sludge bent to the music on their Rotten Records debut, The Core. With the record, the four-piece pay homage to fallen drummer Hunter Holland, who died late last year but appears on the album and has since been replaced in the band by Seth Long. The songs bounce ideas off Soilent Green and Melvins, but create an altogether darker, more purely metallic atmosphere that calls to mind a doom influence largely absent from the music.

The aforementioned sludge — EyeHateGod, Buzzov*en, etc. — manifests not only in the guitar tones or the screams of vocalist Shawn Corbett, but also the sporadic samples Corbett provides. The keyboard work he adds to opener “The Calm Before” or later cut “The Burden of Ubiquitous Scars” (held back from being an album highlight by some out of place female melodic vocals) adds a subtle and unique bent to the material without being overbearing. The keys are hardly ever the focus, even on the interlude “Amor Fati,” which appears in the middle of The Core. The closest they come is the horror movie intro of “Schadenfreude,” but that could just as easily be a sample.

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What the hell these two dudes are doing in Los Angeles is beyond me. Get thee to San Francisco!

Guitarist/bassist/keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter David Melbye, who also happens to have produced Heavy Water Experiments‘ self-titled album (Intrepid Sound Recordings), and El Salvadorian drummer Roberto Salguero have an oft-soothing psychedelia that at least in my mind runs antithetical to the commercial horror parade that is Hollywood. The surprising moodiness of opener “Goldenthroat” and progressive, softly-keyboarded indie of “Mirror the Sky” seem better suited to the Bay Area‘s reputation for supporting and fostering creative free-thinking. Perhaps my vision is skewed because I live on the opposite side of the country, but L.A. has always struck me as being the place Midwestern runaways go to die. And yes, I’ve been there. They have an Amoeba Records; I couldn’t not go.

In any case, Heavy Water Experiments, formerly known as Imogene, offer casual flirtations with distorted stoner-style riffs (“Neverlove”), but never really give themselves over to the fuzz of, say, Fu Manchu, which probably works to their benefit. The sunny aspect of several of these songs — “Anodyne,” the acoustic-led “Oracles,” the lovestruck “Dementia” — wouldn’t work in such a traditionally guitar-centric context, but as it’s presented on Heavy Water Experiments (and kudos to the mixer as well, by default I assume it was Melbye) the band is able to bring in an array of sounds and make it work without being limited by any particular genre confines. They’re psychedelic, but by its very nature, that tag is amorphous.

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It’s a “Where does the time go?” kind of situation to think that Pennsylvania‘s Stinking Lizaveta have been around for 15 years. I don’t even remember the first time I saw the trio (which is probably no accident), but the last time was at the Brighton Bar in Long Branch, probably New Jersey‘s most fabled venue for this kind of music. The avant instrumentalists were promoting their last record, Scream of the Iron Iconoclast (At a Loss Recordings), and as ever, their live presentation brought extra excitement that their recorded output was lacking. There’s something about just watching them play.

Guitarist Yanni Papadopoulos, bassist Alexi Papadopoulos (think maybe they’re related?) and energetic drummer Cheshire Agusta don’t ever have an expensive light show or videos playing behind them — there isn’t really any spectacle to what they do on stage — but seeing them go back and forth with their quirky jazzified doom adds an appreciable element that is lost on the average disc listen. Even with eyes closed, trying to soak in each and every note of new album, Sacrifice and Bliss (once again At a Loss).

That’s not to say nothing has changed in Stinking Lizaveta. Bolstered by Sanford Parker‘s production, the sweet tones of “When I Love You” that transition into the first of several excellent guitar solos from Papadopoulos sound full and engaging, and where the band’s music has always had a kind of limited appeal — to musicians or a certain brand of the stoner faithful — Sacrifice and Bliss feels more welcoming than past output. As someone who wasn’t that into Scream of the Iron Iconoclast, the difference is palpable.

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It looks like what must be some kind of clerical error has worked in my favor and I’ve been accepted into the Rutgers University MFA program for fiction. I’m not sure how this could have happened, but I’m glad it did. I know you’re thinking, “Hey, Oldy, aren’t you a little old to be going back to school?” Yeah well up yours. How’s that for literary craftsmanship?

Usually I’m loath to put this kind of personal news on the site, but I’m patting myself on the back this time so I can take a minute to express my gratitude to my wife, without whose dilligent research and flat-out nagging me to actually create a writing sample, the entire thought would have been abandoned long ago, like most other pipedreams that come and go in the average week (speaking of, anyone want to start a desert rock band?). I didn’t think I had a chance in hell of getting into any of the schools to which I applied, especially with applications up because of the dog fart state of the economy, but she made me finish the process anyway and now that she was right, I can safely say it wasn’t a waste of time.

So that’s that. Classes start in the fall on the Newark campus. In the meantime, by way of celebration, I’ll be doing what I most enjoy these days — writing about records. Tomorrow The Obelisk will undergo an experiment that will top anything yet attempted: Five full-form reviews in one day. I’ve never done five single posts in that amount of time, let alone five reviews, and I honestly don’t know if my feeble brain can handle it, but dammit, I’m going to give it a shot, and tomorrow’s the day.