You ever get one of those songs in your head that just doesn’t seem to want to leave? Well, as I reported (and then re-reported) a little while ago, one of the discs in with the last All that is Heavy haul was the self-titled debut from Sweden‘s Asteroid. Turns out this record, which I didn’t know much about going into it, fucking rules, and the last song on it, “Dr. Smoke,” might be the stoniest bit of stoned out stoneriffic stoneification I’ve heard in the last year. Makes just about everyone else look like real squares, man.

Now, if you do a search on this site going by the tags, you’re going to find that the answer with the most results is “Gods,” and that second to that is “Sweden,” so understand I’m a fan of this style of the heavy, but these three ?rebro dudes (?rebroans? ?rebroheims?) have early Truckfighters-style fuzz down to a science and rock with a laid back vibe that is an instant chill. I can’t find an mp3 of “Dr. Smoke” anywhere or a clip on YouTube, but there’s a couple videos on the Asteroid MySpace page, and among them is one for organ-ic Asteroid opener “The Great Unknown,” which is also catchy as hell and presented below for your viewing convenience.

And just because the math of life sometimes has funny ways of punching out equations, Asteroid have a new record due out this fall on Fuzzorama. Hopefully there’ll be more to come on that soon.

Pretty dead today after a long weekend an explanation of which will come sooner or later in the form of a live review. In the meantime, when I woke up early this morning and starting heading back to the valley, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was in the car CD player (that’s right, I still have one), so I figured I’d start the week here the way I started it in real life. “Killing Yourself to Live” seems appropriate enough. Anyone needs me, I’ll be tracking down some ibuprofen.

Just about everything concerning Indianapolis traditional doomers The Gates of Slumber is heavy, from their look (there is nothing more metal than a skullet, and I say that completely without irony or facetiousness) to their riffs, to the artwork and medieval brutality of their lyrics. Seriously, these guys are fucking metal. No counterpoint necessary.

I wasn?t a big fan of Conqueror, their last album, which was released by Profound Lore in 2008 and turns out to have been their breakthrough, but after spending some time with their Rise Above debut, Hymns of Blood and Thunder, and particularly after seeing them live with Zoroaster on the North America is Doomed Tour, I?ve been given a new context in which to understand and appreciate what they?re doing. When these dudes rock out like Candlemass, it?s not retro silliness or hipster bullshit. They might just be the guys who wear Cirith Ungol shirts and actually own the records.

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After the considerable buzz that surrounded them following the 2007 release of their debut, self-titled EP through Translation Loss, Boston?s Bloodhorse make a firm statement with Horizoner, clearly demonstrating there?s more to stoner metal in 2009 than Sleep worship or post-metal posturing. With nine tracks in just under 50 minutes, the trio update Kyuss riffs with beard metal sensibilities, pounding drums, and semi-melodic vocal shouts. It?s new school, for sure, but Bloodhorse?s up-from-the-basement aesthetic serves them well when it comes to unleashing their sometimes speedy charge.

Horizoner is a bold release from the outset, beginning with the album?s longest track, ?A Good Son,? the first six minutes of which is pure intro. With a full song tacked onto the slow build start (if you can?t abide a band taking a while to get where they?re going, you?re in the wrong genre), ?A Good Son? stretches near 10 minutes, two and a half longer than the next closest, but it also sets the tone for the record perfectly. Bloodhorse have a strong, aggressive take on ?90s stoner rock that shows itself in huge Torche-style guitars and vocals which, on the short ?Aphoristic,? come on with punk rock velocity. Drummer Alex Garcia-Rivera, who also engineered and mixed this recording, shows himself to be versatile enough in whatever gear the song takes, his crash and tom work being principle to the success of ?A Passing Thought to the Contrary? and other cuts throughout.

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Well, everything’s back that’s coming back after the big site crash. No more stuff to be “RECOVERED.” Onward to the future. Listen to Akimbo and celebrate with me in riffy glory.

Congratulations to Brooklyn‘s Naam, who according to the PR wire, have just finished their self-titled full-length debut. Here’s the story, complete with enough adjectival phrases to last you a week:

Brooklyn, NY, heavy psych rock band Naam has completed work on its debut album. The fast-rising buzz band will drop the self-titled Naam on October 20, 2009 via NYC?s Tee Pee Records.

The follow up to the group?s three-song mega-EP Kingdom, Naam was recorded on an abandoned dairy farm in New York‘s Catskill Mountains and delivers pitch-dark, utterly hypnotic songs that resurrect the concept of space-rock for a new era. Naam?s raw, feedback-powered sound pools densely distorted riff-o-rama with throbbing bass lines and echoey, buzzy vocals that seem to hang in the open spaces in between. Calling for comparison to The Stooges, MC5, Can, Loop and Hawkwind, the music of Naam conjures both post-apocalyptic dazzle and unsettling feeling via punishing, deeply penetrating repetition and twisted vapor trails of guitar. Naam pounds giant riffs into submission resulting in downered sub-blues melancholia that sounds like the soundtrack to a missing hallucination scene from Easy Rider. Naam?s high-voltage power and addictive sonance has found favor with both metalheads and psychedelic rock fans alike, all of whom have talked up the group?s thundering musical muscle.

The final track listing for Naam is as follows:
1.) Kingdom
2.) Stone Ton
3.) Skyling Slip
4.) Fever if Fire
5.) Tidal Barrens
6.) Icy Row
7.) Westered Wash
8.) Frosted Tread
9.) Windy Gates
10.) Black Ice

Naam features Ryan Lugar (guitars, vocals), John Bundy (bass, vocals) and Eli Pizzuto (drums, percussion).

In a lot of ways, this review feels completely irrelevant. I mean, it?s KK Null. The guy has over 100 albums and makes electronic noise. What?s there to discuss? Wikipedia says he likes Butoh dancing… so there?s that. But basically, Tokyo?s Kazuyuki Kishino (aka KK Null) is an entity unto himself when it comes to sonic expression. And a prolific one at that. So far, according to the discography page on his website, he?s already got two records out in 2009, including a collaboration with Los Angeles noise composer John Wiese. I?m sure there are others to come or not yet listed.

2008?s Oxygen Flash is not Kazuyuki?s first album for Neurot. The label also handled 2003?s Atomik Disorder and the 2001 offering from his more straightforwardly musical band Zeni Geva, 10,000 Light Years. Kazuyuki also has his own label, Nux Organization, and has put out albums on Important Records, Crucial Blast, Alternative Tentacles and many others over the course of his career, and while Oxygen Flash borders on unlistenable, the experimental drive behind it (and I mean really experimental, not just putting guitar riffs in awkward time signatures) is admirable. The nine unnamed tracks go from aurally welcoming to punishingly abrasive, with high pitched electronic frequencies urging a visceral response from any and all who hear them. It?s one of those records that, were you to hear it under the influence of any sort of hallucinogen, you?d end up ripping your eyes out of their sockets.

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Named presumably for the mythological river that erases the memories of soon-to-be-reincarnated souls rather than the actual river in Alaska, Seattle instrumental trio Lethe make their debut on Reptile Records with Mnemosyne, a full-length titled after the goddess of memory who, by sleeping with Zeus, created the nine muses (Wikipedia is fun). So while there aren’t any lyrics to be had on the album, Lethe are nonetheless clearly working with a theme in mind. It’s the little touches.

With bassist Dylan Desmond having recently made waves with doomed behemoths Samothrace, you could call Lethe a side-project, but the band has a feel uniquely its own, mashing post-Neurosis riffs with pastoral stoner grooves (occasionally touching earlier Pelican territory, but careful not to let its feet stamp too hard thereupon) and offering sporadic twists almost on a one-per-track basis. Mnemosyne is made of five cuts, the shortest just over six minutes and the longest well over 12, but the splitting up is almost arbitrary because the band offers contrasting heavy and subtly rumbling movements throughout. Centerpiece and lengthiest of the bunch, the title track feels almost like it could be three separate songs, like the live-sounding drums of Adrian Guerra (Sod Hauler, Victory Garden) are the what’s keeping the whole thing from floating downstream and losing itself entirely. Not by any means a bad thing, since although they’re more than willing to meander, Lethe are equally capable of reining themselves back from even the most sudden cusp of self-indulgent oblivion.

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