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Miss Lava Premiere “The Great Divide” Video From Doom Machine LP

miss lava the great divide

Portuguese heavy rockers Miss Lava release their new album, Doom Machine, Jan. 15 on Small Stone and Kozmik Artifactz. The band’s fourth long-player and second through Small Stone behind 2016’s Sonic Debris (review here), it is an explosion of well-crafted, professional-sounding material that feels built for European heavy-fest stages. Your Desertfests, certainly SonicBlast, they’re already booked for a festival in Spain this March (which seems ambitious), and so on. It was, appropriately enough, recorded live, with Miguel “Veg” Marques at the helm of Generator Music Studios in Sintra. The energy with which the songs are delivered is only part of the album’s personality though, because the CD version comes with a whopping 15 tracks running a total of 56 minutes, as the returning four-piece of vocalist Johnny Lee, guitarist K. Raffah, bassist Ricardo Ferreira and drummer J. Garcia tear into one hook after the other, careening with desert-inspired purpose through “Fourth Dimension” and “In the Mire” at the outset like an all-grown-up Kyuss with the rest of the album that follows working in different stages set off by interludes, groups of one or two songs complemented by short pieces of varied atmosphere that lend breadth to the proceedings as a whole.

Most of those spacers are quick instrumentals. Guitar, bass, drums. “Magma,” the first of them, and “Karma” follow that pattern, while “Alpha” adopts a more mellow spirit and the last, “Terra” captures wave sounds and guitar noise ahead of the closing title-track, which is also the longest song on the outing at 6:58. The interludes bolster Doom Machine‘s flow and make it all the more immersive despite being largely based around straightforward craft of high grade verses and choruses, though certainly longer stretchesmiss lava doom machine like “Brotherhood of Eternal Love” (5;46), the Alice in Chains-style harmonized “The Fall” (6:31) and “Doom Machine” itself want nothing for atmosphere. “The Fall” is a highlight in that regard, but it contends with single-worthy cuts like the maddeningly catchy “Sleepy Warm” and the slower, more spacious “The Great Divide” nearby for that title, with the latter as the assumed end of the vinyl’s side A and, indeed, the split between the first half of the album and the second — not counting the bonus tracks. That’s not to mention a cut like “The Oracle,” later on, which singlehandedly shows how Miss Lava take cues from classic desert rock and turn them into something of their own all across Doom Machine as a whole. Maybe it’s safer not to talk about highlights.

Amid the many hooks, interludes and spot-on moves made throughout Doom Machine is the narrative of K. Raffah having lost a child after only a month and a half from birth. That brutal context underpins even the most uptempo of Miss Lava‘s songs here, and adds weight to already impactful pieces like “The Fall” and “In the Mire” earlier on, the melodies and momentum betraying little of what’s actually going on but remaining expressive nonetheless. One doesn’t want to call it a disconnect, but Doom Machine hardly sounds dragged down by grief or anything else as Miss Lava courses through. Even the bonus tracks, “God Feeds the Swine,” ‘Feel Surrea” and “Red Atlantis,” boast quality hooks — the last one of them especially so — so there is a balance of elements and themes at play throughout, and the band aren’t necessarily beholden to one or the other of them, as impossible as that might seem.

To wit, the video premiering below for “The Great Divide” takes a post-apocalyptic environmentalist stance, looking out at the world and seeing it being used and torn down by humanity as a whole. The clip was directly by José Dinis, who offers some comment on it below, along with that of Johnny Lee.

As always, I hope you enjoy:

Miss Lava, “The Great Divide” official video premiere

According to singer Johnny Lee, “‘The Great Divide’ is a euphemism for death, an apocalyptic vision for mankind. We keep destroying our planet and forgetting that when this ends, it ends for everyone.”

Director José Dinis reflects that this is “A concept story about an apocalyptic world, where an unhopeful man just tries to survive. As in real life, there is always a way out, a solution, a chance to live a more colourful life, no matter what.”

“The Great Divide” was filmed at Mina de São Domingos, a deserted open-pit mine in Alentejo, Portugal. The site is one of the volcanogenic massive sulfide ore deposits in the Iberian Pyrite Belt, which extends from the southern Portugal into Spain. It was the first place in Portugal to have electric lighting.

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Miss Lava on Bandcamp

Sonic Debris at Small Stone’s Bandcamp

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Kozmik Artifactz website

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