Posted in Whathaveyou on December 18th, 2017 by JJ Koczan
Rochester, New York, three-piece King Buffalo spent an admirable portion of 2017 on the road supporting their 2016 debut album, Orion (review here), which was issued by Stickman Records, including runs that took them to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, and a European tour alongside formidable labelmates Elder that just recently wrapped. Somewhere along the way, they found time to put some new material to tape, and the resulting Repeater EP — named for its sprawling, 13-minute-long opening title-track — will arrive just after the first of the year, right in time to be the first inclusion in my notes for the best of 2018’s short releases. Funny how that works out.
They don’t have any of it streaming publicly yet, but vinyl preorders for the self-release are up now through their BigCartel store, where one can also find a digipak CD pressing of their initial demo and loads of other goodies audible and wearable. They sent the following announcement along the PR wire:
KING BUFFALO RELEASE EP, REPEATER, ON JAN. 5
King Buffalo, the Rochester three-piece whose discography includes, a 2013 EP titled Demo, a 2015 split 12” with Le Betre, a 2016 debut album Orion, will self-release their newest EP, Repeater, on January 5th.
“Repeater is something we spent a lot of time with,” drummer Scott Donaldson explained. “We originally envisioned it being part of our sophomore full length, but soon realized it was a release of its own. These three songs developed organically in our practice/recording space in early 2017. They flow through a cohesive vision and form a complete thought like Orion. It wouldn’t have made sense to us, to have them released in any other way. They’ve become some of our favorite songs to play live and you can really sense that from the recordings. We look forward to seeing what people think, and we’re beyond excited on how it all turned out.”
In discussing the EP, Nick DiSalvo of Elder said “Repeater is a spacious, warm sounding record — and as the title implies, it’s deceptively repetitious: the songs breathe, bloom organically and envelop the listener while still being hypnotized by its groove. Somewhere between psychedelic, fuzz rock and shoegaze King Buffalo claim their sonic turf, and it’s not hard for me to imagine this is what big sky country sounds like.”
King Buffalo is Scott Donaldson (drums), Sean McVay (guitar/vocals/synth) and Dan Reynolds (bass/synth).
Repeater track list: 1. Repeater 2. Too Little Too Late 3. Centurion
Posted in Features on December 18th, 2017 by JJ Koczan
Please note: This post is not culled in any way from the Year-End Poll, which is ongoing. If you haven’t yet contributed your favorites of 2017 to that, please do.
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Every successive year brings an absolute inundation of underground productivity. Every year, someone new is inspired to pick up a guitar, bass, drums, mic, keyboard, theremin, cello — whatever it might be — and set themselves to the task of manifesting the sounds they hear in their head.
This is unspeakably beautiful in my mind, and as we’ve done in years past, it seems only fair to celebrate the special moment of realization that comes with a band’s first album. The debut full-length. Sometimes it’s a tossed-off thing, constructed from prior EPs or thrown together haphazardly from demo tracks, and sometimes it’s a meticulously picked-over expression of aesthetic — a band coming out of the gate brimming with purpose and desperate to communicate it, whatever it might actually happen to be.
We are deeply fortunate to live in an age (for now) of somewhat democratized access to information. That is, if you want to hear a thing — or if someone wants you to hear a thing — it’s as simple as sharing and/or clicking a link. The strong word of mouth via ubiquitous social media, intuitive recording software, and an ever-burgeoning swath of indie labels and other promotional vehicles means bands can engage an audience immediately if they’re willing to do so, and where once the music industry’s power resided in the hands of a few major record companies, the divide between “listener” and “active participant” has never been more blurred.
Therefore, it is a good — if crowded — time for an act to be making their debut, even if it’s something that happens basically every day, and all the more worth celebrating the accomplishments of these first-albums both on their current merits and on the potential they may represent going forward. Some percent of a best-debuts list is always speculation. That’s part of what makes it so much fun.
As always, I invite you to let me know your favorite picks in the comments (please keep it civil). Here are mine:
The Obelisk Presents: The Top 20 Debut Albums of 2017
1. Telekinetic Yeti, Abominable
2. Rozamov, This Mortal Road
3. Mindkult, Lucifer’s Dream
4. Dool, Here Now There Then
5. Eternal Black, Bleed the Days
6. Arduini/Balich, Dawn of Ages
7. Vinnum Sabbathi, Gravity Works
8. Tuna de Tierra, Tuna de Tierra
9. Brume, Rooster
10. Moon Rats, Highway Lord
11. Thera Roya, Stone and Skin
12. OutsideInside, Sniff a Hot Rock
13. Hymn, Perish
14. Riff Fist, King Tide
15. Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree, Medicine
16. Abronia, Obsidian Visions/Shadowed Lands
17. Book of Wyrms, Sci-Fi Fantasy
18. Firebreather, Firebreather
19. REZN, Let it Burn
20. Ealdor Bealu, Dark Water at the Foot of the Mountain
Honorable Mention
Alastor, Black Magic
Devil’s Witches, Velvet Magic
Elbrus, Elbrus
Green Meteor, Consumed by a Dying Sun
Grigax, Life Eater
High Plains, Cinderland
Kingnomad, Mapping the Inner Void
Lord Loud, Passé Paranoia
Masterhand, Mind Drifter
The Necromancers, Servants of the Salem Girl
Owlcrusher, Owlcrusher
Petyr, Petyr
The Raynbow, The Cosmic Adventure
Savanah, The Healer
War Cloud, War Cloud
WhiteNails, First Trip
I could keep going with honorable mentions, and no doubt will add a few as people remind me of other things on which I brainfarted or whathaveyou, preferably without calling me an idiot, though I recognize that sometimes that’s a lot to ask. Either way, the point remains that the heavy underground remains flush with fresh infusions of creativity and that as another generation comes to maturity, still another is behind it, pushing boundaries forward or looking back and reinventing what came before them.
Notes
Will try and likely fail to keep this brief, but the thing I find most striking about this list is the variety of it. That was not at all something I planned, but even if you just look at the top five, you’ve got Telekinetic Yeti at the forefront. Abominable is something of a speculative pick on my part for the potential it shows on the part of the Midwestern duo in their songcraft and tonality, but then you follow them with four other wildly different groups in Rozamov, Mindkult, Dool and Eternal Black. There you’ve got extreme sludge from Boston, a Virginian one-man cult garage project, Netherlands-based dark heavy rock with neo-goth flourishes, and crunching traditionalist doom from New York in the vein of The Obsessed.
What I’m trying to say here is that it’s not just about one thing, one scene, one sound, or one idea. It’s a spectrum, and at least from where I sit, the quality of work being done across that spectrum is undeniable. Think of the prog-doom majesty Arduini/Balich brought to their collaborative debut, or the long-awaited groove rollout from Vinnum Sabbathi, or how Italy’s Tuna de Tierra snuck out what I thought was the year’s best desert rock debut seemingly under everybody’s radar. Stylistically and geographically these bands come from different places, and as with Brume and Moon Rats, even when a base of influence is similar, the interpretation thereof can vary widely and often does.
That Moon Rats album wasn’t covered nearly enough. I’m going to put it in the Quarterly Review coming up just to give another look at the songwriting on display, which was maddening in its catchiness. Maddening in its cacophony of noise was Stone and Skin from Brooklyn’s Thera Roya, which found itself right on the cusp of the top 10 with backing from the ’70s heavy rock vibes of the post-Carousel Pittsburgh outfit OutsideInside. Norway’s Hymn thrilled with their bleak atmospheres, while Australia’s Riff Fist showed off a scope they’d barely hinted at previously, and Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree offered surprises of their own in their warm heavy psych tonality and mostly-instrumental immersion. That record caught me almost completely off-guard. I was not at all prepared to dig it as much as I did.
Thrills continue to abound and resound as the Young Hunter-related outfit Abronia made their first offering of progressive, Americana-infused naturalist heavy, while Book of Wyrms dug themselves into an oozing riffy largesse on the other side of the country and Sweden’s Firebreather emerged from the defunct Galvano to gallop forth and claim victory a la early High on Fire. REZN’s Let it Burn got extra points in my book for the unabashed stonerism of it, while it was the ambience of Ealdor Bealu’s Dark Water at the Foot of the Mountain that kept me going back to it. An album that was genuinely able to project a sense of mood without being theatrical about it was all the more impressive for it being their first. But that’s how it goes, especially on this list.
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There you have it. Those are my picks. I recognize I’m only one person and a decent portion of my year was taken up by personal matters — having, losing a job; pregnancy, childbirth and parenting, etc. — but I did my best to hear as much music as I could in 2017 and I did my best to make as much of it as new as I could.
Still, if there’s something egregious I left out or just an album you’d like to champion, hell yes, count me in. What were some of your favorites? Comments are right down there. Let’s get a discussion going and maybe we can all find even more music to dig into.
Thanks for reading and here’s to 2018 to come and the constant renewal of inspiration and the creative spirit.
Posted in Bootleg Theater on December 18th, 2017 by JJ Koczan
There is a strong current of metallic righteousness in Under the Mountain, the debut full-length from Edinburgh four-piece King Witch. Marked out by the powerhouse vocals of Laura Donnelly, songs like the rampaging title-track, “Possession” and “Carnal Sacrifice” are propulsive atop Lyle Brown‘s crisply popping snare, the thrashing-at-a-moment’s-notice riffs of Jamie Gilchrist and the low-end punch of Simon Anger. As “Black Dog Blues” sprints the record to its conclusion, it seems only fitting that a siren should go off in the last couple measures. A sense of emergency well earned. Go, go, go.
Still, that rush doesn’t quite take into account moves that King Witch make elsewhere on Under the Mountain — which is due out Feb. 9 via Listenable Records — such as the fluid rollout of the north-of-six-minutes progressive nodder “Solitary,” its post-title-track doomly counterpart “Approaching the End,” which stomps out its rhythm calling to mind the best of early Candlemass, or the purposefully bluesy “Ancients,” which follows. Even the more uptempo “Hunger” seems more geared toward rock than metal, so already on their first album, we hear a strong refusal from King Witch to remain one-sided. As the album plays out its 43-minute run, that ends up being one of its great strengths.
“Beneath the Waves,” the leadoff cut for which the band has a newly-unveiled Moby Dick-style video, would seem to be a hook-laden middle ground between several of these impulses, and for that it makes both a fitting opener and a solid candidate as a single. I’ll hope to have more on the album before it’s out, but you’ll find the clip for “Beneath the Waves” on the player below, followed by more info from the PR wire.
As always, I hope you enjoy:
King Witch, “Beneath the Waves” official video
This February, Listenable Records will unleash Under The Mountain, the debut full-length from Scotland-based metal/doom rockers KING WITCH. In advance of its release [comes] the band’s official video for “Beneath The Waves.”
Elaborates vocalist Laura Donnelly, “‘Beneath The Waves’ was inspired by stories such as Moby Dick and explores man’s need to destroy anything and everything beautiful, dangerous, and unfamiliar… and the retribution dealt in return. This track felt like a natural choice for the video – soaring vocals, massive drums and some huge riffs!”
KING WITCH: Laura Donnelly – vocals Jamie Gilchrist – guitars Lyle Brown – drums Simon Anger – bass
Posted in Whathaveyou on December 18th, 2017 by JJ Koczan
Granted they haven’t been around super-long or anything like that, but it kind of seems like just about every time I’m writing about about Roman trio Fvzz Popvli, they’re announcing a European tour. To wit, the post archive. If you have to work on a theme though, that’s an admirable one to go from, and it looks like what they’re calling the “second leg” in support of their Heavy Psych Sounds debut, Fvzz Dei, will be their most expansive stint yet, so all the better. At this point, I would not expect it to be the last announcement they have for 2018.
Ever bringing the hard-hitting questions, the PR wire wants to know if you’re ready to rock. Well, are ya, punk?
Have at it:
Fvzz Popvli “second leg” European Tour 2018!!!
Magical Mistery VAN Events & HEAVY PSYCH SOUNDS are proud to announce the second leg of the “Fvzz Dei European Tour”! After the first european demolition in October happened in Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France… Now Fvzz Popvli are ready for hit the road again from January the 26th to February the 25th in Italy, Germany, Swtizerland, Belgium and Holland. Are you ready to rock?
26/01 – CH – Basel – Bar Renée 27/01 – CH – Winterthur – Gaswerk 1/02 – IT – Roma – 30 Formiche 8/02 – IT – Milan – Spazio Ligera 9/02 – CH – Frauenfeld – KAFF 10/02 – CH – St Gallen – Rumpeltum 11/02 – D – Rosenheim – Asta 14/02 – NL – Utrecht – ACU 15/02 – BE – Leuven – Sojo 16/02 – NL – Den Haag – Musicon 17/02 – NL – Nijmegen – De Onderbroek 20/02 – D – Bielefeld – Potemkin 21/02 – D – Liepzig – Black Label Pub 22/02 – D – Berlin – Tiefgrund 23/02 – D – Dresden – Roter Baum 24/02 – CH – Zurich – Ebrietas 25/02 – IT – Parma – Art Lab
“Fvzz Dei” wich in latin means “The Fuzz Of The Gods”, it’s the debut album of the roman Fuzz Rock trio named “Fvzz Popvli”. Datio on bass, Doncalisto on drums and Pootchie already guitar player from “The Wisdoom” and “Beesus” are ready for introduce you tribute to the Fuzzy sounds from the “Proto-Punk” till the modern “Heavy Psych”. “Fvzz Dei” will bring you into a rough and bluesy fuzzed-out universe. The album is produced mixed and mastered in Murduck Productions studio based in Rome, recorded with the warm sound of an analog mixer from italian 80’s tv shows, and mastered with a real tape analog support! The songwriting it’s a compromise between instrumental jammed songs and the “classic tune format”. The artwork conceived and maked by Rise Above, it’s a illustration about an ancient roman teathral mask, the first example amplification in the world. Just three words: FUZZ, ATTITUDE and ROCK’N’ROLL!
FVZZ POPVLI ARE: FRANCESCO “POOTCHIE” PUCCI – Guitar and Voice (BEESUS,The Wisdoom) DATIO PALATIO – Bass (The Anthony’s Vinyls) Doncalisto – Drums
Posted in Bootleg Theater on December 15th, 2017 by JJ Koczan
Katatonia, Last Fair Deal Gone Down (2001)
Primarily in my mind, 2001’s Last Fair Deal Gone Down is a winter album. Not at all Katatonia‘s first outing that one might think of as geared toward colder climes — their debut, after all, was 1993’s Dance of December Souls — but from the lachrymose unfolding of opener “Dispossession” and the weepy backing lines of e-bow guitar to Jonas Renkse‘s depressive vocal melodicism, the Stockholm group’s fifth long-player has always carried a chilly association. So of course it was released in May.
Issued via Peaceville Records, it’s not a record history looks back on with any particular favor, but it’s one I’d consider vastly underrated for the quality of its songs and atmosphere. More than a decade into their tenure around the core founding duo of Renkse and guitarist Anders Nyström at that point, Katatonia, like British cohorts Paradise Lost, Anathema and My Dying Bride — the so-called “Peaceville three,” of which one might think of Katatonia as the fourth but for the fact that they’re not from the UK — had cast off their earlier death/doom sound in favor of said focus on atmospheric approach. Last Fair Deal Gone Down, comprised of a CD-era swath of 11 songs spread over 50 minutes, marked the first time Nyström and Renkse joined forces with brothers Fredrik Norrman (guitar) and Mattias Norrman (bass), as well as drummer Daniel Liljekvist, and as a five-piece, they continued to flesh out the stylistic progression of 1999’s Tonight’s Decision, nestling into the unabashed emotionalism and hooks of songs like “We Must Bury You,” “Teargas,” “Tonight’s Music,” “The Future of Speech” and “Passing Bird” while referencing what was then modern alternative rock in a piece like “Sweet Nurse,” which carries echoes of Failure‘s “The Nurse Who Loved Me” from 1996’s Fantastic Planet and foreshadowing future delving into progressive doom on “I Transpire” and closer “Don’t Tell a Soul.” These pieces, as well as “Chrome” and the later “Clean Today,” arrive with a consistency of character thanks to a fluid and at times lush-sounding production, giving Last Fair Deal Gone Down a somewhat gentle touch despite being weighted in tone and at times strikingly aggressive, but it’s ultimately the songwriting that most stands the work out from Katatonia‘s vast discography and the output that their aforementioned peers were releasing at the turn of the century.
All formed roughly in the late ’80s and earliest ’90s, Katatonia, Paradise Lost, Anathema and My Dying Bride helped greatly to establish what would become death/doom, but none of them would stay put entirely within that sphere. Paradise Lost went gothic and by 2001 were on their way toward trying their hand at radio-friendliness (because in 2001 that was a thing), and Anathema were in full-on depressive mode with A Fine Day to Exit, brooding and sad but not at all metal. My Dying Bride, who put out The Dreadful Hours the same year, arguably stayed closest to what one might think of as their core sound, but Katatonia‘s progression was particularly striking because rather than present its changes in flashes, it all carried such a sense of presentation. To listen to Last Fair Deal Gone Down, they’re clearly trying new things and working out ideas as they’d never done before, and yet the footing beneath them is so sure that there’s never any doubt they’ll pull it off in the end. And of course they do. There’s nothing angular about it. Nothing pokes you in the eye and says, “Hey, this is us doing something we haven’t done,” but the tracks are undeniably coming from a place beyond Tonight’s Decisionor anything that preceded it. A strong focus on keyboard textures provide a hallmark of its era, but where others of their ilk clumsily made their way into the unknown, Katatonia on Last Fair Deal Gone Down move with a gracefulness that speaks not only to their maturity as artists, but to the idea of their having thoroughly worked on this material in fleshing it out to where they wanted it to be, refusing to make any album other than that which they wanted to make, and knowing how to realize their own vision in the actual recording process.
Katatonia have put out five-arguably-six records since Last Fair Deal Gone Down, and as it was their fifth album, it’s fair to think of it at this point as being part of a middle-period for the band. Emotional dramas — sometimes, admittedly, melodramas — would continue to persist in their sound from 2003’s Viva Emptiness across 2006’s triumphant The Great Cold Distance, 2009’s Night is the New Day (discussed here), 2012’s Dead End Kings and last year’s The Fall of Hearts (review here), and there are trace elements across all their offerings that one can follow all the way back to 1993 if one is willing to embark on such a winding path, but most importantly, they’ve never failed to on some level push themselves forward from album to album, whether it’s a matter of tightening songwriting around a new lineup or finding new modes of expression for the melancholy that seems to have taken up permanent residence in their souls. Not to wish anyone ill, but long may it reign.
As we move toward the darkest days of the year, this one seemed all the more fitting. I hope you agree, and as always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading and listening.
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Rougher start to the week than finish, and little question I have The Patient Mrs. to thank for that. I was kind of a wreck on Monday and Tuesday and a redirect Tuesday night involving more cloud bread and leftover pesto helped situate me for the last couple days. I’ve been in therapy for two weeks now, going Monday mornings, and this week was hard. My therapist wants me to see my primary care doctor to get an electrolyte panel and and EKG done because I have an eating disorder and I guess the concern is I could be doing damage to my heart. Fair enough. That appointment is next Thursday. I don’t anticipate there being any problems, but one never knows. Sometimes life is interesting.
In the meantime, I didn’t stay there long, and that was on purpose, but in my daily weigh-ins, I hit 150 pounds for the first time this week. When I started this whole low-carb thing about two years ago right around this time, I was 330 pounds, which means I’ve lost upwards of 180. It is utter fucking madness to see those numbers typed out.
Oh, I’m also five years sober as of last week. I didn’t even remember the date had passed. I think it was the ninth? Might’ve been the fifth. I don’t know. Either way though, that was Dec. 2012 that I “took a weekend off” drinking.
The Pecan continues his now-seven-week-long process of becoming a human being. Lots of poop, lots of puke, lots of laundry to be done. Blah blah blah, knee deep in baby stuff. He’s cute. The Patient Mrs. likes him. I like him. The Little Dog Dio isn’t so sure, but she’ll get on board eventually.
This is usually the part where I’d post my notes for next week. Well, at some point I’m going to review the next part of The Second Coming of Heavy and at some point I’m going to put up my top albums of the year, but I’m not sure when all that’s going to happen yet, so I’m keeping it vague for the moment. I’ve got a premiere slated for Bible Black Tyrant next Thursday, new videos for King Witch and Black Space Riders early in the week, and if I can I’d like to review the new C.O.C. too, but that might be the week after. Up in the air.
So there you have it. Ups and downs. Music. Life.
From my daze and days of semi-conscious infant fatigue, I wish you all the best as ever. The Patient Mrs. mom is coming north this weekend to watch The Pecan for a couple hours so we can go see the new Star Wars and I’m looking forward to that, and I’m doing a radio interview on Sunday, but other than that, some reading and work on year-end list stuff shall persist. You’ll probably see it coming, but it’ll be January before I know it.
Have a great and safe weekend, and once again, thanks for reading. Please don’t forget to check out the forum and radio stream.
I think it’s fair to consider the first US tour from Greek heavy rock forerunners 1000mods the most significant arrival on North American shores of a European underground band since Truckfighters‘ first tour in 2011. I could not possibly be more thrilled to have The Obelisk have a hand in presenting this run with Tone Deaf Touring and Action PR. “Stoked” simply does not begin to describe it.
Why? Because, simply put, 1000mods are ready. It’s going to be a big change for them from what they’re used to from being on the road in Europe, the level they’re at and so on, but I honestly don’t think they’d hit the States at all if they weren’t looking to make a habit of it. Anything’s possible and this could be a one-time thing, but either way, as they support their strongest work yet on 2016’s Repeated Exposure To… (review here), they seem primed for the embrace of a new audience. Also just announced for Hellfest Open Air in France next June, they’re already veterans multiple times over of the Desertfests and have crisscrossed Europe in admirable fashion for years now. It’s great to imagine them doing the same thing in America and once again building their audience from the ground up as organically as they have elsewhere.
Kudos to the band for taking on the task, and thanks to them as well as to Tone Deaf and Action for letting this site be involved in any way at all. Support on the run comes alternately from Sierra and Telekinetic Yeti. The official announcement for the tour follows here, as seen on the PR wire, with ticket links (more to go on sale this Monday):
Grecian Stoner Rock Heroes 1000mods Announce North American Headlining Tour
Celebrated Heavy Psych Group to Bring Electric Live Set to Western Hemisphere for First Time in Decade-Plus Career
Esteemed Greek heavy rockers 1000mods have announced their first-ever North American tour dates in the form of a winter, 2018 headlining tour. Set to launch on February 2 in Mexico City, the 29 city major market trek will run through March 5 in Brooklyn, NY, showcasing a group with a worldwide fan base that is hailed for its astute professionalism, resounding hooks and highly energetic live performances. 1000mods will visit North America as part of its current world tour and in support of its most recent album, ‘Repeated Exposure To…’ Support on the 1000mods tour will be provided by Canada’s Sierra and Iowa’s Telekinetic Yeti.
“We feel more than excited to visit America for first time in our career. We have been looking for this for many years and after having amazing connection with our american fans through social media and music platforms, now it’s time to catch us live – the best way to enjoy our music,” says drummer Labros G. We feel also really glad having two amazing up-coming bands with us in order to spread the fuzz!”
Posted in Reviews on December 15th, 2017 by JJ Koczan
Full disclosure, this past summer I was asked by Borracho to write the liner notes for this release. If you think that means there’s a conflict of interest in my covering Riffography on an editorial level, two things: First, I took no payment. Second, it’s more of an alignment of interest than a conflict, since if I wasn’t interested in them in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have done the liner notes and I wouldn’t be writing about Riffography again now. Still, if you think that means I can’t be impartial, well, impartiality is a myth and I write about the records I feel like writing about. Get over it.
I’ll admit I didn’t think much of Borracho around the time of the Washington, D.C.-based heavy rockers’ 2011 debut, Splitting Sky (review here). I’d heard significant hype about the then-four-piece (always a turnoff) and I found the album in need of a deeper-sounding mix and an editorial impulse. Promising “Repetitive Heavy Grooves” as a slogan, it delivered, but didn’t seem to have the dynamic behind it to stave off redundancy while riding its formidable grooves. Part of my issue as well was the gruff vocal approach of guitarist Noah Greenberg, who was too far forward ahead of his and Steve Fisher‘s guitars. I mention this only to emphasize the most underappreciated and undermentioned aspect of everything Borracho have done since Splitting Sky: their growth.
Now the trio of Fisher, bassist/backing vocalist Tim Martin and drummer Mario Trubiano, they’ve never put out a release that did not showcase marked progression from the one before it, and it’s precisely that story that Riffography (on Ripple Music) is telling as it marks a decade since their first outing, a split 7″ with Adam West the featured track from which, “Rectify,” opens here in suitably raw and rudimentary fashion. Cuts from Borracho‘s three to-date LPs — Splitting Sky, 2013’s Oculus (review here) and 2016’s Atacama(review here) — aren’t featured (one exception), but the narrative arc of Borracho‘s ongoing creative development is clearly represented nonetheless across a packed-in 13 tracks and 75 minutes of weighted riffs, nodding rollout and periodically driving thrust.
Key moments of transition — most notably the departure of Greenberg from the band following Splitting Sky and Fisher taking hold of the frontman role — are depicted, and between “Rectify” and early off-album pieces like “Mob Gathering,” “Circulos Concentricos,” and “Short Ride (When it’s Over),” the collection effectively sets up a timeline that ends with the three songs from Borracho‘s portion of the first installment of Ripple‘s The Second Coming of Heavy (review here) split series — a pivotal moment of arrival in 2015 — and their latest single, “Border Crossing” (premiered here).
The very nature of a release like Riffography is such that, in order to work, it needs to be honest on the level of “warts and all.” It’s true that in the years since Splitting Sky, Borracho have built and worked hard to maintain significant momentum when it comes to their stylistic maturation, the chemistry between Fisher, Martin and Trubiano and amassing an audience. As far as narratives go, theirs is cleaner than most.
But still, Riffography tells the story from all sides, and while largely consistent on the basic level of their sound — the band has worked over the years on multiple occasions with producer Frank “The Punisher” Marchand — these songs aren’t without their bumps and/or bruises. Of particular note is a version of “Stockpile” with Greenberg still in the lineup. That track would appear on Oculus with Fisher on vocals, but it speaks directly to that essential transition in the group and to their trying to make it work as a foursome despite their original singer moving away.
And for what it’s worth, they seem to have learned lessons from their first LP in terms of finding a balanced approach. By the time they get into “Know My Name” from their 2014 split with Boston’s Cortez (review here), however, it’s Fisher up front, getting his footing as a singer and setting in motion a process still happening in building his confidence at the mic while also holding down the fuzz riffing that has helped earn the band such wide distinction throughout their time together.
“King’s Disease” from the 2015 split with Brooklyn’s Eggnogg (review here) follows and seems to return to an earlier rawness of approach with dry-sounding vocals, drums and guitar and bass tones, but works well to emphasize the classic-style swing Borracho honed as a three-piece and the way in which their “Repetitive Heavy Grooves” learned at that point to add engaging subtleties to go along with the forward march at their core.
And while I won’t take away from Oculus at all or the role that album played in establishing Borracho as the band they are today, it was their appearance on The Second Coming of Heavy that really solidified their presence and let listeners know who they were going to be. “Fight the Prophets,” “Superego” and “Shark Tank” remain a thick, rolling and satisfying listen — an EP unto themselves — and in light of the band’s to-date high-water mark in Atacama, one can hear the jammy aspects of that record taking shape in the solo sections of “Superego” and in the first half of “Shark Tank” as a precursor to the thrust that follows later.
It would be fair enough to leave the story there, but “Border Crossing,” which is shorter at 4:10, and a cover of Scorpions‘ “Animal Magnetism” originally intended for use on an unmaterialized tribute CD cap Riffography with perhaps a look forward at how Borracho will keep combining the various personality aspects that have emerged in their sound over time. No question Atacamawas their greatest triumph to this point — and well it should be — but Riffographymakes its point unarguably that Borracho are not now and have never been a band to hold still in their sonic take and not push themselves forward each time out. Accordingly, I’d no more expect their next long-player to rest on Atacama‘s laurels than I expected Atacama to stay in the realm of Oculus.
Further, if one wants to examine Riffography on a meta-level, in addition to summarizing Borracho‘s first decade together, it also serves to hold the momentum until that proverbial “next album” arrives, which again, is something they’ve always done so well. It might seem like a curio or a piece for fans more than casual listeners, but in both its exclusives and its gathered inclusions, Riffography puts due emphasis on how special a band Borracho have become over the last 10 years and reminds that their evolution is ongoing. For that, it is ultimately about their future nearly as much as their past.
Posted in Whathaveyou on December 15th, 2017 by JJ Koczan
Somehow, no matter how many times I sign up for the email updates and no matter how regularly I check in, I perpetually feel like I’m playing catch-up with the Across Tundras/ T.G. Olson Bandcamp page. Releases tend to show up unannounced, and by the time they’re there, well, you’re already late. There’s been a flurry of activity of late as the prolific-as-ever Tanner Olson has made a number of offerings available as limited CDRs with handmade packaging in addition to posting new outings from his drone projects Inget Namn and Funeral Electrical — lest we forget it’s only been two months since his latest solo album, Searching for the Ur-Plant (review here), surfaced as well — and yeah, it’s a lot to keep up with.
Nonetheless, any new Across Tundras is good news as far as I’m concerned. Their next full-length has been in progress on one level or another for a couple years now, and in 2015, they issued the stopgap Home Free EP (discussed here) that was said at the time to feature tracks that would be on the record. I don’t know if the same applies to the just-issued two-songer Blood for the Sun / Hearts for the Rain, but for a recently-recorded sampling of the band’s trademark heavy rambling style and a more acoustic-based complementary piece, I’m not about to complain. 10 minutes of new Across Tundras; today was a good day.
As ever, the release is available as a name-your-price download via the Bandcamp page linked below, so go and get it before the next offering shows up and you’re already behind. Trust me, it can happen. In thinking of the delay on the new Across Tundras LP though, note that Blood for the Sun / Hearts for the Rain was recorded between Olson and bassist/drummer Matt Shively in Nebraska and Virginia. That’s one hell of a geographic divide to overcome for a writing/recording session. Might explain some of what’s taking so long, even if they’re just working as a two-piece rather than the band’s traditional trio incarnation.
Alright, here’s the goods:
Across Tundras – Blood for the Sun / Hearts for the Rain
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Matt Shively and Tanner Olson in Plattsmouth, NE and Roanoke, VA in the Summer of 2017.
1. Blood for the Sun 05:32 2. Hearts for the Rain 05:28
Tanner Olson – Guitar, Vocals Matt Shively – Bass, Drums
