Album Review: Josiah, We Lay on Cold Stone
Following a discography’s worth of well-timed catalog reissues, UK-based heavy rockers Josiah issued We Lay on Cold Stone, their first full-length in 15 years, as part of Blues Funeral Recordings‘ PostWax subscription series. In the interest of full disclosure, I do the liner notes for that series (usually late) and am theoretically compensated for doing so, if in LPs. I’ve been hesitant in most cases to put together a review after speaking to the artist, writing about the record from an ‘inside’ point of view, and being involved in a small way in the release, but as with Lowrider‘s Refractions (review here) in 2020, it feels warranted to dig in here as well.
From a perspective standpoint, this is more about the result than the making of the LP — though it’s almost inevitable I’ll say the same thing twice; true from one sentence to the next — but if it’s an ethical question, I’m never claiming impartiality because I don’t believe it exists, and as I listen to the six songs and 39 minutes of We Lay on Cold Stone, the prevailing sentiment is now what it was the first time I heard the album: garage rock ain’t like it used to be. And no, that’s not a complaint.
Fronted by Mathew Bethancourt, who here handles guitar, a goodly portion of the bass, multiple channels’ worth of vocals — that’s at least three in the midsection break of “Saltwater”; again, not complaining — all keys and even drums on three tracks, Josiah was never a band to follow rules. Even as the tenets of aughts-era stoner rock were being laid down, Josiah turned to Hendrixian garage rawness and psychedelia, creating a sonic identity born of classic swing and an ability to go not only where the song wanted, but where they wanted too, an alignment of interests that’s rarer than they make it sound.
Bassist Simon Beasley — since replaced by Jack Dickinson, best known as guitarist/vocalist for Stubb — and drummer D.C. Lockton want for nothing as a rhythm section, but after he spent a decade-plus careening through bands like Leicester’s The Kings of Frog Island, the deeply undervalued Cherry Choke, Dexter Jones Circus Orchestra and his own Mathew’s Hidden Museum solo-project, Josiah‘s return feels very much like a homecoming for Bethancourt, and it accordingly bears recognizable hallmarks of his craft.
Those include but aren’t by any means limited to a fluid use of multiple fuzz tones on a single track, so that the deeper layer in the 10-minute penultimate highlight “(Realise) We Are Not Real” — more a hope than a demand in its lyrics — is a reward for headphonic engagement, an organically malleable, clear vocal that cuts through the distortion and crash surrounding, and boogie derived from whichever lost ’70s classic it makes you feel coolest enough to know. But most of all, We Lay on Cold Stone manifests Josiah‘s refusal to adhere to the meme-style, stoner-riffs-as-text-on-background tenets of microgenre, to stand still, to be one thing. In 2022, does that mean your garage rock is GarageBand? Maybe.
But throughout We Lay on Cold Stone, Josiah continually turn when they’ve made you feel like they’re headed straight ahead. The music is able to carry through every pivot from the crow calls in opener “Rats (To the Bitter End)” onward through the hard ’60s boogie of “Saltwater,” the violent and self-aware soundtrack-ish opening of “Let the Lambs See the Knife” and the reinvention of Queens of the Stone Age‘s “Millionaire” riff that becomes Josiah‘s own with the leads winding around it, to the what-space-rock-would-be-if-it-was-burrowing-underground-instead “Cut Them Free,” the far out hook in the later reaches of the aforementioned “(Realise) We Are Not Real” and the bookending finale “The Bitter End,” the steady drum pattern of which has the indisputable push of an Endless Boogie track, but is something else entirely. Whatever style you tag a given song, part, etc., the LP is not primitive, or rusty, or haphazard in its execution, even when it wants you to think it is.
To jam or not to jam, that is the question. And when listening straight through, the answer is “yes” often enough to keep you guessing, but sneaky hooks in “Saltwater,” “Let the Lambs See the Knife,” and even “(Realise) We Are Not Real,” lyrics repeating in different forms, different layering — the barks and croons in their own channel in “Saltwater,” for example — also offer landmarks along the way, so that you’re not just following Josiah as they go farther and farther into hi-we’re-back aural oblivion. There’s structure at work right unto “The Bitter End,” with its subtly proto-doomed descending riff and insistent but unrushed answer back to the nigh-on-perfect pacing of “Let the Lambs See the Knife.”
Mood, tone, vocal and instrumental melody and pace are all likewise bendable in Josiah‘s work, and the band are no less effective in conveying the violence of “Let the Lambs See the Knife,” than the connection between rodents and rising oceans in “Rats (To the Bitter End)” and “Saltwater;” the not-quite-unspoken accusation of our responsibility for the currently unfolding climate disaster around the world. But while We Lay on Cold Stone is inherently Josiah‘s in terms of presentation, the deftness of the music and the flow that makes it such a joy to follow, the double-meaning there is that it belongs to Bethancourt as the driving force in the trio.
That’s not to take away from the contributions of Beasley or Lockton, or those Dickinson might make as they continue to move forward (it would be a crime not to have him join Bethancourt on vocals, at least once), but the personal vibe, the almost intimate nature of the progression through “Cut Them Free,” into side B’s “(Realise) We Are Not Real” and “The Bitter End,” is directly traceable to the guitarist, and it is the guitar that is at the root of the songs. Garage rock it might be, but Josiah were always and still are more about the fuzz and fulfilling the needs of their songs more than the expectations of their audience.
I would not expect their next record — which, as I understand it, is a thing that’s going to happen — to sound like We Lay on Cold Stone, since at least one hopes it won’t be made in quarantine and the lineup has changed as noted, but in capturing the advent of Josiah in the 2020s, the album holds as much promise for what’s to come as it harkens to what made the band’s first run so engrossing to begin with. I won’t say I’m impartial about it, but I will say it’s a ripper and this is a band who earn twice over every bit of hype they get, for the work they did back then and for the work they’re doing now. May they keep it going.
Josiah, We Lay on Cold Stone (2022)
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