For the next 10 days I’m going to take a look at just a sampling of the killer acts playing this year’s Stoner Hands of Doom festival in Virginia from Nov. 7-10 at Strange Matter, and I couldn’t think of a better place to start than with the unhinged Southern sludge aggression of Lord. A band whose history is filled with underappreciation, makeups, breakups, lineup changes and whatever else you can think of, Lord has nonetheless served over the years as a proving ground for those who’s also make a stamp in Fredericksburg and Richmond bands from Ol’ Scratch and Ancient Astronaught to Akris and The Might Could. What’s been consistent for them over all this time is the intensity of their sludge, which they most recently demonstrated on the 2011 full-length, Chief (review here), which was alternately violent and brooding, a torrent of chaos that mirrors the band itself.

Of course, that being the case, there’s a kind of permanent X-factor around the band. Since the days of their 2006 long-play debut, Built Lord Tough, you’ve never known quite what you’re going to get with Lord, who’s going to be there and what kind of madness is going to be unleashed. They played Stoner Hands of Doom two years ago at Krug’s Place in Maryland (review here) along with Cough, Earthling, Fire Faithful and others, and what seemed to be becoming an annual gig at the festival was cut short in 2012 when vocalist Steven “Kerch” Kerchner announced they had called it quits:

Lord will unfortunately not be playing SHOD this year. Lord has officially disbanded. We had a blast rocking while we did and appreciate the love and support everyone has given us over the years!! Everyone is still jamming in other projects – definitely check them out: Bourne of Ash, Lacy, House Size Giant, Akris, Palkoski. There are still a limited number copies of Chief available from the members of Lord and it can still be downloaded from iTunes and so on. Love you guys – Kerch

As someone who’s been a fan of the band since the long, long ago, in the beforetimes, naturally it was a bummer to hear they were done, but though the members were busy in the projects listed by Kerch above — Akris have a new record out now (stream it here), and Palkoski never seem too far removed from another challenging slab of noise — apparently the split didn’t take, and they’ve once again joined SHoD and are set to bring their melee to Richmond this year. Not only that, but the band’s lineup of Kerchner, guitarist Willy Rivera, bassist Helena Goldberg and drummer Stephen Sullivan are also reportedly at work writing a new full-length, which they’ll record sometime after the appearance at Stoner Hands of Doom XIII.

How that will come together remains to be seen, but if Lord are working on something at all, you won’t hear me complain. They play SHoD on Sunday, Nov. 10, and share the bill with Devil to Pay, Black Thai, Wizard Eye and others. Check out “Zoh K Zo Kay” from Chief and find more details below:

Lord, “Zoh K Zo Kay” from Chief (2011)

Stoner Hands of Doom XIII

Lord on Thee Facebooks

Heavy Hound Records

Earlier this month, Polish heavy rock foursome Satellite Beaver took the stage for Robustfest in Kiev, Ukraine, where they played with The Machine, Bomg (that’s not a typo), The Grand Astoria, Belzebong, and others. Here’s what they had to say about it afterward:

Rob here. It seems we just discovered hangover equivalent of sludge and now we have to deal with it. It’s damn painful and feels like Kirk Windstein himself stomping our heads.

Robustfest festival was great, same with the afterparty with our friends of Stoned Jesus, The Brimstone Days and others. Huge thanks to festival’s crew and great people who shown up here and there. Ukraine is intense.

Oh what an intense trip it was! We’re back, after 1500+ kilometers travelled, dozens of people met and tons of fun we had. Pure craziness.

Kiev, Ternopil – you do rock!

Certainly it must have been a hangover for the ages to prompt an invocation of Kirk Windstein. One hopes Satellite Beaver have recovered by now, as they’ve reportedly begun work recording their next album as a follow-up to last year’s The Bow EP (review here). Word on the street is instruments are done, vocals soon to follow, so there’s another one to keep an eye out for early in 2014.

There are a couple live clips of Satellite Beaver‘s striped pants heavy metal boogie at Robustfest, and thus far they’re all new material. Seems they’re just itching to get the new songs out, which is a good sign.

Enjoy:

Satellite Beaver, Live at Robustfest Vol. III

Satellite Beaver on Thee Facebooks

Satellite Beaver on Bandcamp

It was a weird kind of night, but I like weird. Uzala were coming from the other side of the country — Boise, Idaho, and Portland, Oregon — and had brought YOB‘s Mike Scheidt along for the tour, also picking up still-nascent Chicago outfit Mount Salem on the way. The three acts weren’t exactly lacking variety between them, with Scheidt playing acoustic, Mount Salem indulging Korg-inclusive cult rock and Uzala crushing with plodding noise, but the show, which took place at Dusk in Providence, Rhode Island, was rounded out by local black metal shredders Bog of the Infidel. So yeah, kind of all over the place with a sphere of underground heavy, but still definitely a good time.

Providence is about an hour away from me. It still took me less time to get to Dusk than it ever took me to get across Manhattan and into Brooklyn from New Jersey, though, and I suspect that once I get used to the drive, I won’t find it at all unpleasant. I had Druglord‘s new tape (review forthcoming) along for the ride to set the mood and was excited to see Uzala particularly. The flyer for the show listed Scheidt at the bottom, so thinking there was a chance he’d be going on first, I took it as an instruction to get there fairly early. He did indeed wind up playing before any of the others, but even so, his set didn’t start until a little before 10PM. It was going to be a late night.

Sure enough, that’s how it played out. To get things moving and make up for lost time from the late kickoff, Scheidt played a shorter set, starting with a Townes van Zandt cover — pretty sure it was “Rake,” but don’t quote me on it — and part of a new song before going into two from last year’s solo debut, Stay Awake (review here), including the churning set-closer “Stay Awake,” which has only proved more of a landmark in Scheidt‘s songwriting in the year since the album was released and with a couple tours like this one under his belt. In that time, he’s clearly gotten more comfortable with the form of playing by himself. His set was loose,  casual and relaxed, but still conveying emotion and the sense of purpose behind the songs. It looked like something he was doing because he enjoyed it, rather than an experiment in something new, and when he fucked up the new song, he laughed it off like it didn’t matter at all, and so it didn’t.

Mount Salem formed in 2012 in Chicago, and I was going to say something about how in another couple years they’d be ready to hook up with Metal Blade‘s current cult rock fetish, but it appears they already have, so kudos. Money’s tight, but I will at least admit to picking up a CD of their self-released debut EP, Endless, and since I’d seen their name around over the last few months, I was eager to see what they had on offer. Vocalist Emily Kopplin started the set alone on stage setting a mood with keys and vocals before being joined by bassist Mark Hewett, guitarist Kyle Morrison and drummer Cody Davidson for a round of songs mostly culled from that EP. Everything sounds like Saint Vitus to me lately, but the stomp at the beginning of “Hysteria” seemed specifically indebted to “Born too Late,” though Morrison was sure to toss in lead notes and add personality to the familiar rhythm, and I found that though I had a pretty clear understanding of where Mount Salem were coming from in terms of their influences — taking that Vitus pace and offsetting it with strong cult/stoner blues chug while Kopplin topped with her powerful, versatile voice — they delivered everything I could have reasonably asked for such a new band on the road.

They had the tone, the vibe, and the approach pretty much down — not to mention the songs — and considering a lot of bands never get to that point, it’s all the more impressive that Mount Salem would essentially start out that way. The overall feel of “Good Times” was familiar within the genre, but the song nonetheless lived up to its name, and it seemed in watching them that all Mount Salem really needed to do was continue to put in work touring to refine their take. I’ll look forward to getting to know their EP, which came out earlier this year, and to finding out where their next batch of songs brings their sound. When they were done, they quickly loaded their gear off stage so that double-guitar five-piece Bog of the Infidel could get started.

My opinions on black metal vary widely depending on mood. Sometimes it’s all pretenders to the throne of two or three bands (what genre isn’t?) or dudes trying their best to sound Norwegian without thinking about why, and other times it’s ripping good fun, the brutality and extremity of something like Dark Funeral or Averse Sefira or any number of others providing its own excuse for being within a style that at this point has had three decades of development. Bog of the Infidel were tight and fast with some underpinnings of brutal groove amid a few showings of technicality — also armbands — and though I wondered why they, as the locals on an already late night, wouldn’t take the closing slot of the show and let Uzala play to what would almost certainly be the bigger crowd while also making more sense sonically coming after Mount Salem, they were solid at what they were doing and we should all enjoy anything in life as much as drummer Wraitheon seemed to delight in each blastbeat. Midnight came quickly as they ran through their set, as one imagines it would have no matter what time they’d gotten going.

After they were finished, Scheidt helped Bog of the Infidel load their gear out and Uzala set up on the quick, their logos cut into steel frontplates for their backlined cabinets. They’ve been too easy a band for me to let slide, frankly. Their 2012 split 7″ with Mala Suerte was streamed here, as was a bonus track from the cassette version of their 2011 self-titled debut full-length, but seeing them, I still didn’t feel like I’d ever really dug into what they were doing. Now a trio after parting ways with bassist Nick Phit (Graves at Sea), they split the guitar signals of Darcy Nutt and Chad Remains (whose name sounds even more like “charred remains” when said with a proper New England accent) through bass amps so the set lacked nothing for low end. Their new album, Tales of Blood and Fire, was released last week on King of the Monsters Records and they had both the tape and CD on hand and kept the setlist focused heavily on that material, only delving back to the self-titled to open with “Death Masque” and otherwise playing exclusively new cuts.

I hadn’t heard Tales of Blood and Fire yet, but it didn’t make a difference. Uzala‘s grooves were immersive on the immediate, and the periodic onslaughts of noise that came with Remains‘ solos only added to the overarching gnarl of their doom. They were, as so few bands are, an example of the difference a great drummer can make, as Chuck Watkins (also of Graves at Sea) alternately propelled and lumbered songs like “Burned” and “Dark Days,” the band hitting their own Vitus moment in the noisier wash of the former. Highlight moments came later into their set though, as the extended “Countess” proffered choice tempo shifts and a particularly right on performance from Nutt on vocals to go with the slowly unfolding riffs, and the subdued later stretches of “Tenement of the Lost” closed their set and Dusk alike. The house lights came up as Nutt, Remains and Watkins continued the quiet trance of what would be their last song (the image of the three of them continuing to pursue the demons in that song I expect will be what stays with me longest about this show), and as soon as they were done, one of the bartenders stood in the big, open window from outside and told the crowd in no uncertain terms to fuck off right out the door if they weren’t buying merch or in one of the bands. It was past one in the morning and I’ve always had a knack for following simple instructions.

More pics after the jump. Thanks for reading.

Read more »

My feeble mind can rarely conceive of heavy rock from Copenhagen without getting at least a flash of the 13th Floor Elevators-style chicanery of Baby Woodrose, but newcomer trio Doublestone are on a different trip. Their Levitation Records debut full-length, Wingmakers, follows three EPs and was recorded earlier this year by none other than Mos Generator guitarist/vocalist Tony Reed. While that tells me the 10-track/41-minute collection must have been put to tape in a decent hurry, since presumably Reed was on tour at the time — unless he did it after the shows were over — the album hardly sounds rushed, instead working at a comfortable pace to capitalize on heavy ’70s and heavy ’10s influences alike.

Expectedly, shades of Graveyard show up in the boogie of “In the Forest” or the shuffling and catchy “Fire Down Below,” but Doublestone have a kind of pagan lyrical thematic in that song and others like “Born under a Hollow Moon,” “The Bringer of Light,” “Witch is Burning” and closer “III III III (Götterdämmerung)” that sets them apart, and with Reed at the helm, the production on Wingmakers is warm but hardly retro. Opener “Save Our Souls” sets an immediately modern mood with talk in its first lines of drones and satellites, so however derived the rush might be, there’s some subtle contextualizing at work that finds Doublestone working to develop their own sound within the genre.

“The Endless Line” and the smooth low end of “Born under a Hollow Moon” seem to be begging for swagger from guitarist/vocalist Bo Blond, bassist Kristian Blond and drummer Michael Bruun, but the swinging roots are there and both those tracks and the rest groove well alongside the periodic inclusion of organ, which gives Wingmakers a tie to cult rock as well as to the classic heavy modus they’re in part working from. They have some growing to do, but the album sounds engaging and full, particularly as the title-track and side A closer picks up with tonally rich nod en route to a solo both classy in itself and not backed by needless rhythm tracks, keeping to a robust live feel.

Could it be the birth of cult boogie? Seems unlikely, but I wouldn’t conjecture either way. Most importantly, Doublestone give a solid first long-play showing, and set themselves up as having a deceptively individual take to work from their next time out. It would hardly be fair to ask more of Wingmakers than that, except maybe some explanation of what the title means.

Whatever the answer to that might be, you can hear Doublestone now as part of the streaming The Obelisk Radio playlist, and get a feel for what they’ve got going on with “In the Forest” below. Wingmakers is out Nov. 6 on Levitation Records. Enjoy:

Doublestone, “In the Forest” from Wingmakers (2013)

Doublestone on Thee Facebooks

Doublestone’s website

Levitation Records

Whatever else Melana Chasmata, the second album from Tom G. Warrior‘s post-Celtic Frost outfit Triptykon, might have to offer, two things about it are pretty much guaranteed: It’s going to be insanely dark and it’s probably going to have H.R. Giger artwork. From there, it’s up in the air as to where the actual sonics of the album might go. Triptykon‘s first offering, 2010’s Eparistera Daimones (review here), was an a-number-one mindfuck, bleak and oppressive and rife with torment, but it was also constructed from a lot of older parts that might’ve otherwise become Celtic Frost songs, as Warrior recounted in the liner notes. Whether Melana Chasmata will come from the same well of material, I don’t know, but I’m sure interested to find out.

The PR wire sent news of the album’s April 24, 2014, release date, and of course Triptykon were previously announced for Roadburn as well, so good things all around:

TRIPTYKON set to release second album MELANA CHASMATA April 24, 2014

Prowling Death Records/Century Media Records

TRIPTYKON is the occult/avant-garde metal band formed by Hellhammer/Celtic Frost singer, Tom Gabriel Warrior. After his exit from Celtic Frost in 2008, Warrior is proud to announce the groups’ second album, Melana Chasmata, set to be released on April 15 in North America. The album’s release will is a collaboration between the group’s own label, Prowling Death Records Ltd., and renowned metal giant Century Media Records. This is the same label partnership already responsible for Celtic Frost’s final album, Monotheist (2006), Hellhammer’s Demon Entrails demo compendium (2008), and Triptykon’s debut album, Eparistera Daimones, and Shatter EP (2010).

Melana Chasmata is evolving to be a vastly varied and strikingly dark and heavy album. The album’s title may be translated, approximately, as “black, deep depressions/valleys”.

Songwriting, arrangement, and recording sessions for Melana Chasmata occurred, intermittently, since 2011. Among the music available for inclusion on the album are songs such as Boleskine House, Stasis, Gate To My Own Death, Demon Pact, Gehinnam, Tree Of Suffocated Souls, Unchristian Anthem, and many more. A final track listing for Melana Chasmata will be issued in due course, along with further details on both album and artwork.

Much like Eparistera Daimones, Melana Chasmata is being produced by Tom Gabriel Warrior and Triptykon guitarist V. Santura, and recorded and engineered by V. Santura at his own Woodshed Studio in Bavaria, Germany, as well as at Triptykon’s bunker in Zurich, Switzerland.

Tom Gabriel Warrior: “We have been working on Melana Chasmata for some three years, in various shapes and forms. It’s not an easy album by any means, and to me personally it reflects an extremely complex gestation period, musically, spiritually, and, due to certain circumstances in my life, emotionally. At the same time, the album unquestionably reflects the continuity I was longing for so much during Celtic Frost’s period of self-destruction and demise. Hearing Triptykon creating such utter darkness again and exploring the potential of these new songs has been incredibly invigorating and inspiring.”

TRIPTYKON consists of V. Santura (guitar, vocals), Norman Lonhard (drums, percussion), Vanja Slajh (bass), and Tom Gabriel Warrior (voice, guitars).

TRIPTYKON Live 2014:
February 21 Bergen (Norway) – USF Verftet / Blastfest
April 13 Tilburg (The Netherlands) – 013 / Roadburn Festival
April 30 Munich (Germany) – Backstage / Dark Easter Metal Meeting (Facebook event)

More dates are to be announced soon…

TRIPTYKON online:
www.triptykon.net
www.facebook.com/triptykonofficial

Triptykon, “Goetia” Live at Wacken Open Air 2011

Even as far as Wino Wednesday posts go, this one’s pretty Wino‘ed out. The date was May 28, 1999, and Spirit Caravan was playing in Wheaton, Maryland, at a club called Phantasmagoria that they would play many times over their years together, both earlier as Shine and later until their breakup in 2002, and right in a row in the set the now-legendary three-piece of Scott “Wino” Weinrich, Dave Sherman and Gary Isom covered “To Protect and Serve” by The Obsessed and “Bitter Truth” by Saint Vitus. One Wino-fronted band taking on songs by two others. It couldn’t get any more Wino if the dude was wearing a Shine shirt at the time — oh wait, he was. So there you go.

Separated by a span of six years, “Bitter Truth” and “To Protect and Serve” work pretty well together, especially since it’s Spirit Caravan playing them. The Saint Vitus song appeared originally on 1988’s Mournful Cries, which is kind of the bastard child of Wino‘s first era as Saint Vitus vocalist (the second era, by the way, is happening now), sandwiched in the discography between the landmark 1986 outing, Born too Late, and 1990’s V. Cuts like “The Troll” and “Shooting Gallery” still feature in Vitus sets at least as of last week, and rightly so. Likewise, “To Protect and Serve” was a single from The Obsessed‘s 1994 swansong, The Church Within, and that material has always hit heavier live than on disc.

That’s all the more the case with Sherman‘s bass carrying the groove alongside Wino‘s riffs (nothing against Guy Pinhas, who played on the record, or Reid Raley, who’s been The Obsessed‘s bassist on their current reunion run). As Wino takes a solo around two minutes into “To Protect and Serve,” you can hear Sherman hold out notes and kick back in, and it’s telling of the kinds of grooves go on to proffer in Earthride.

Really, the tall dude up front who spends the whole time headbanging and pumping his fists has the right idea, so I’ll shut up and let this one play out. Enjoy and have a great Wino Wednesday:

Spirit Caravan, “To Protect and Serve” and “Bitter Truth” live in Wheaton, MD, May 28, 1999

Lumbar, “Day Six” from The First and Last Days of Unwelcome

[mp3player width=480 height=150 config=fmp_jw_widget_config.xml playlist=lumbar-day-six.xml]

There’s nothing comfortable about listening to Lumbar‘s debut and quite possibly only outing, The First and Last Days of Unwelcome. A 24-minute full-length comprised of seven tracks of huge tones and fraught wails, screams and psychedelic helplessness, there’s a consuming darkness in the audio that bleeds through the atmosphere in layers of drones, lumbering riffs and varied vocals from the three component members of the project — Aaron Edge (Roareth, Rote Hexe, Hauler, etc.), Tad Doyle (TAD) and Mike Scheidt (YOB, Vhöl) — all of whose personalities are evident throughout the monumental proceedings.

Aaron Edge has spent years bouncing from band to band, new project to new project, as well as working as a graphic designer for Southern Lord (which is releasing Lumbar) and others in a sort of tornado of creativity. In all my dealings with him — Roareth‘s first and only CD came out on The Maple Forum — I’ve found him to be passionate, dedicated and exceedingly driven. The kind of person who’s already there by the time you’re ready to go. Relentless in his energy and will to create, he’s also a marathon runner, long-distance biker, vegan and straightedge. Someone for whom movement both conceptual and physical is the norm. Perhaps because of that it was all the more a shock early this year when he was diagnosed with MS.

Talking to him about it now, several months after the fact, Edge hardly remembers how he spent the 40 solid days in bed from the pain, but it was during this traumatic time that he wrote what would become Lumbar (and two other in-progress projects) once Scheidt and Doyle got involved. The name Lumbar derives from the medical procedure “lumbar puncture,” also known as a spinal tap, wherein a needle is inserted between the vertebrae of a person’s back and spinal fluid is collected for diagnosis. Edge has had a few at this point, and one could easily look at The First and Last Days of Unwelcome as the same kind of process.

Because where many might allow for some distance — that is, might wait until an experience is over and then write an album about it — in Lumbar, Edge thrusts listeners into the moment itself. The album’s seven tracks, broken down as “Day One,” “Day Two” and so on, are like a transcription of agony. There isn’t distance or the feeling of safety that distance might provide. With Scheidt and Doyle contributing to the vocal arrangements and recording, Edge tells a story through captured moments that’s haunting, tragic, beautiful, hopeful at times and incomplete in the way that life itself is incomplete and in the way that his story, his battle with this disease, is ongoing and continues to shape what has become his being.

In the interviews that follow, Edge discusses how Lumbar came together, working with Scheidt and recording with Doyle, the relationships he’s had with the two over the years, doing art for YOB and playing drums for a time in Doyle‘s band, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, as well as sharing the first listen to the finished product of The First and Last Days of Unwelcome with family and friends in a moment of communal support, while Scheidt — checking in from Idaho on a solo tour alongside Uzala — expands on his friendship with Edge, how he came to be involved in Lumbar and his feelings on how the album came out.

Because I spoke to Edge first, then Scheidt, that’s how I’ve chosen to present the Q&As. If you haven’t yet, check out “Day Six,” one of the album’s most exceedingly righteous stretches, on the player above.

The First and Last Days of Unwelcome will be released on LP and digital through Southern Lord on Nov. 26, with CD to follow from the band and a cassette through Holy Mountain.

As always, thanks for reading. Interviews are after the jump.

Read more »

Electric Moon are pretty high up on my crowded list of bands I’m really glad I got to see at this year’s Roadburn fest, and the news that they’ll be performing a live collaboration with Papir (who also play separately) as part of the 2014 Afterburner lineup only makes that more enviable in my eyes. There’s a record out the two acts have together, cleverly called The Papermoon Sessions, but it seems like live they’ll be doing improv stuff. Fodder for another live album? Yeah, probably. I’m still hoping for one of Electric Moon‘s 2013 set.

San Francisco-based Carlton Melton have also joined the Roadburn 2014 lineup, and pre-sale tickets are available now right here. More info follows, hoisted from the Roadburn website:

The Papermoon Sessions (Papir Meets Electric Moon) To Bring Improv Krautrock Jams To Roadburn 2014 Afterburner

We’re thrilled to announce that two of the most fascinating European improv / psychedelic bands, Papir (DK) and Electric Moon (DE), will bring their tranced-out psych kraut exclusively to Roadburn 2014, channelling their mysterious cosmic vibes in The Papermoon Sessions as part of the Afterburner on Sunday, April 13th at the 013 venue in Tilburg, The Netherlands.

The bands spontaneously recorded The Papermoon Sessions at Denmark’s Dragens Hule with Mogens Deenfort Pedersen on August 9th, 2012. The S/T album will be released on October 25th on Dave Schmidt‘s Sulatron records.

Led by Sula Bassana‘s (Dave Schmidt‘s) fuzzed-out, heavy guitar explorations, Electric Moon weave pure-psychedelia, dub, doom, krautrock and drone into kosmische improvisations via a myriad of intergalactic riffs, stellar effects and deep-space transmissions. The overall vibe of their epic but hypnotic freak-outs can be utterly mesmerizing or darker than the depths of the most monstrous of black holes, but all the while remaining deeply psychedelic.

Sounding vital and fresh, Papir‘s cutting-edge take on psychedelica doesn’t hark back to a bygone era, but voyages through lush valleys of atmospheric soundscapes into peaks of wah wah driven, explosive guitar solos, all propelled by jazz-inflicted motorik grooves that serve to give the louder parts more impact.

The band’s use of balance and structure, freedom and power, heaviness and laid back atmospheres comes to full fruition on their latest album, the terrific III, out on Causa Sui‘s adventurous El Paraiso label, and puts Papir squarely in the vanguard of the booming European psychedelic rock scene, along with Electric Moon.

Papir will bring their own extraordinary type of semi-improvised psychedelic rock to Roadburn Festival 2014 on Saturday, April 12th at the 013 venue.

Backed by a full band – Komet Lulu (bass), Marcus Schnitzler (The Spacelords, Electric Moon / drums), Rainer Neeff (The Pancakes, Zone Six, Krautzone / guitar) – Sula Bassana (guitar / synthesizers) will propel us through hyperspace, taking us on an utterly absorbing and surreal journey into the captivating and colorful sounds of the cosmos at Het Patronaat on Friday, April 11th (please note the date change).

Roadburn Festival 2014 will run for four days from Thursday, April 10th to Sunday, April 13th 2014 at the 013 venue in Tilburg, The Netherlands.

Roadburn Festival 2014 ticket pre-sales are in full swing! GET IN ON THE ACTION HERE

Carlton Melton To Channel Kosmische Kraut-Age Vibes at Roadburn Festival 2014

There’s no shortage of psychedelic rock at Roadburn 2014: as part of their artist-in-residence activities, The Heads (ft. John McBain) will collaborate with fellow psychedelic travelers Carlton Melton in an exclusive one-off Roadburn performance on Sunday, April 13th at the 013 venue in Tilburg, The Netherlands.

Carlton Melton recently completely a short tour of northern Europe, electrifying audiences from Amsterdam to Oslo. We just wished they could have stayed longer, which is one reason we are so thrilled to announce that they will be playing their own set at Roadburn 2014, scheduled for Saturday April 12th (013 venue).

San Francisco’s Carlton Melton is centered around former Zen Guerrilla’s Andy Duvall (Guitar / Drums), Rich Millman (Guitar / Synths), alongside Clint Golden (Bass) and occasional 4th member, John McBain who adds flourishes to the psychic weave of their Dome recordings with echoplex and studio mastering; he has mastered all the recent Carlton Melton records.

The band recorded their psychedelic hypno-drone rock in a genuine Geodesic Dome, and have created an insane psychedelic squall utilizing alien guitar swells, freaked out tribal rhythms and strange loping pulsations. The heavy vibrations of Can and Pink Floyd suffuse Carlton Melton‘s work, and they use a bed of classic psychedelic rock as means for the guitars and organ to soar righteously through the stratosphere, before decending into trance-inducing drones which burrow deep into the earth.

Carlton Melton appeals equally to old school bong-bubblers and contemporary cosmic heads. If you prefer old SST label cassette tapes or an early Spaceman 3 or Loop cassette you recently found wedged in the back seat of your car, you need to check out Carlton Melton’s Pass it On, Photos of Photos or their most recent release, Always Even.

Roadburn Festival 2014 will run for four days from Thursday, April 10th to Sunday, April 13th 2014 at the 013 venue in Tilburg, The Netherlands.

Roadburn Festival 2014 ticket pre-sales are in full swing! GET IN ON THE ACTION HERE

Electric Moon & Papir, “The Circle”