Ed Mundell, Rick Ferrante and Collyn McCoy were The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic. Maybe they still are. Maybe time is a construct and it’s all make believe and we’re holograms in someone’s cool-graphics-but-terrible-plot video game. It’s hard to pretend to know anything when you’re listening to their 2013 self-titled debut (review here). In any case, it was a genuine shock when in 2010 guitarist Ed Mundell quit Monster Magnet after playing in the band for 17 years and proving so essential to their greatest commercial successes and some of their hardest rocking fare; lest we forget he was also the original guitarist for The Atomic Bitchwax, but he’d already split from them for years by the time the aughts ended.

Mundell‘s last record with Monster Magnet was 2010’s Mastermind (review here), which sounded huge in a way that was exciting but still divides fans as regards the songs beneath all the voluminous swell. It was probably the band’s final play toward rock radio, and fairly enough timed for that since commercial rock radio didn’t exist for much longer afterward as much as it did even then. In even the ungainliness of their moniker, The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic was a willful left turn from where Mundell left Magnet. Completely instrumental save for some voice sampling on “Unassigned Agent X-27,” the trio’s nine-song/55-minute self-titled debut wove together extended jams like “The Third Eye” and the concluding “In the Atmosphere Factory” — the latter worthy of a samurai duel with Earthless as regards overall Hendrixian shred — with straight up plotted rockers like opener “Rockets Aren’t Cheap Enough,” “7000 Years Through Time,” “Exploration Team” and “Hello to Oblivion,” manic in that particular Bitchwaxian style but air-tight in their delivery, as well as languid psychedelia in “Get Off My World!,” the aforementioned “Unassigned Agent X-27” and the sitar-laced “The Man With a Thousand Names,” the latter reaches of “The Third Eye” and so on.

Nine years later, The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic‘s self-titled still feels like a significant pivot, on the scale, say, of Mundell moving from New Jersey to Los Angeles, which he’d also done. It is a guitar-forward record no matter the sound of a particular track, and in some of its speedier moments can feel overwhelming in its sweep, but that pretty clearly was the idea. Fortunately, Mundell had a rhythm section more than ready to keep up with the twists and turns. Collyn McCoy had been in Trash Titan and a few other projects by then but was already known as an ace bassist, and as the drummer of Sasquatch, Rick Ferrante added enough ‘super’ to the group to coincide with the charge of the material itself. The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic — which the band would eventually shorted to The UEMG, at least informally — was headspinning, but never out of control. They simply came out of the gate and threw down a gauntlet for anyone who dared to pick up. Not inaccessible, neither was it easy listening, and the more one paid attention to what was happening at any particular time — looking at you, “In the Atmosphere Factory” — the more one seemed to be swallowed up by it.

Most of all, it bleeds freedom and the joy of heavy rock guitar itself. I was fortunate enough to interview Mundell at the time and here’s (part of) what he had to say about the songwriting mindset:

“…Well, you know, we’re not trying to get a hit single. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a ‘hit single’ unless you’re Rihanna or whatever. We don’t care if we get on the radio. If it sounds cool and we all like it, then it works. We don’t have a label. (Laughs) We don’t have anything, and we all have been playing forever, so it’s like, ‘Play whatever you want.’ We can do whatever we want. We’re limited by our imagination here, because we don’t have to please anybody but ourselves. …There’s a couple 11-minute songs. ‘Rockets Aren’t Cheap Enough’ is a little over five, and that was pretty much, ‘Alright, let’s try and do a Captain Beyond kind of thing,’ so that was cool. Basically, we don’t have to write a two-minute-and-50-second single or anything, so we can do whatever sounds cool. Rick wanted to do backward cymbals on ‘Unassigned Agent X-27,’ and I was like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s do it! Let’s put a flanger on some backwards cymbals and throw them in there.’ There’s tons of backwards guitars, because I can do whatever I want, and I love the sound of backwards guitars. I love the sound of feedback, and I love the sound of eBows and echoplexes. So it’s like, ‘Alright, let’s go crazy.'”

That last sentiment, the “Alright let’s go crazy,” is about as concise a summary of The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic as one could hope for. Skilled players enjoying the process of letting go and seeing what happens. There’s a sense of adventure in The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic that, while reactionary to what Mundell was doing prior, for sure, still resonates from the record these nine years later. The band offered a follow-up EP, Through the Dark Matter (review here), in 2014, flirted with adding vocals the next year, and were announced for Magnetic Eye Records‘ Pink Floyd tribute in 2017, but did not actually feature on the final release. They’ve done shows periodically, but have seemed to be largely on the backburner as Ferrante has gone on one of heavy rock’s most enviable tears in Sasquatch and McCoy has delved righteously into chasing experimentalist dragons in Circle of Sighs, Night City, and various other incarnations, recently founding Suspirium in L.A. as an arts and performance space.

As for The UEMG, I’d never say never as long as everyone’s still alive, but instead I’ll note that if it was going to be their only full-length, I’m glad this record is packed as tight as it is. Take what you can get when you can get it, and all that. And if you’re ever in search of a record driven by the passion of its own creation, The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic stands ready to serve as an example.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

Thank you to everybody for the kind responses to the Best of 2022 post. It means a lot to me that even where there’s disagreement, that’s expressed in a spirit of friendship and shared enjoyment of the art in question. No one has called me an idiot yet for liking what I liked this year, and I count that as a big win. Again, thank you.

The week otherwise has been wretched. I’ve been sick and my kid has been sick, home from school all week. He has a half-day today and we might send him? It’s been terrible. He doesn’t get sick often and there’s been fights to take medicine and fights to get him to eat food and drink water and everything else. He’s sitting next to me right now, phlegm-hacking away and still miserable. He woke up at 2:30AM and came into our bedroom, a half-hour battle ensued to get him to take kids NyQuil and go back to bed that finally ended when he was allowed to have TWO Rolos after he drank the 15ml down. First thing he did downstairs today was sneeze out a giant ball of snot onto his face. It sucks how much that feels like progress.

I seriously doubt he’ll be better by then given the glacial pace of his recovery thus far, and my own a couple days ahead on the same track — this might just be an all-winter cough — but we’ll almost definitely still pack into the car on Sunday morning and go do Xmas with The Patient Mrs.’ family in Connecticut, Xmas Eve with my family up the road for however long we last. We’ve been especially broke the last few weeks and the mood in the house is tense, grim and generally shitty. I feel like garbage, at least, physically, as a person and as a parent and husband. The Patient Mrs. gets paid this morning and I’ll go buy some Xmas presents and whatnot, but as regards “doing it up,” I don’t think this is really our year. We’ll catch the next one, and The Pecan will get enough presents between us and the rest of the family to keep him occupied for 10-15 minutes, so I’m sure it’ll be fine.

If you’re celebrating this weekend, have fun and be safe. My original plan was to do start the Quarterly Review next week, but no, that’s not happening. I’ll do it in January, split it up if necessary. I need to look at the calendar when I have five conscious minutes, which will hopefully happen sooner or later. I wish you and yours all the best in the meantime.

If nothing else, a great and safe weekend. Stay warm if it’s cold, cool if it’s hot, and watch your head any way you go. Don’t forget to hydrate. So important.

FRM.

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Tags: California, Ed Mundell, self-titled, The UEMG, The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic, The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic Self-titled, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2022 at 11:34 am and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.