Album Review: LáGoon, Bury Me Where I Drop
Admirably prolific, Portland, Oregon, garage scuzz-fuzzers LáGoon have had an album out every year since 2018, along with other live releases, singles, EPs, and so on. Their fifth full-length overall, Bury Me Where I Drop, which is also their first offering through Teschio Dischi and Electric Valley Records, follows after 2021’s Skullactic Visions (review here) and 2020’s Maa Kali Trip (discussed here) — both released via Interstellar Smoke Records — and continues their emergent cohesion within the sphere of loose-swinging, intermittently nihilistic, hippie-violent couchlocked-stoner garage doom and psych.
Raw in tone and presentation, it runs six songs and 30 minutes of scum and villainy, as the original founding duo of guitarist/vocalist Anthony Gaglia and drummer Brady Maurer, who first featured bass on their 2020 Father of Death EP and welcomed Kenny Coombs to the role on the last album, venture into the menacing side of psychedelia and stoner riffing, calling to mind the likes of Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats and Electric Wizard conceptually without sounding all that much like either of them in reality.
Languid rhythms act as cover for grim purposes, and with a methodology not wholly dissimilar to a band like Mountain Tamer, they seem to have an ability to make songs about inward or outward violence sound like the work of the lazily burnt. To wit, between “I See the Hate in You,” “Dead and Gone,” “Bury Me,” which has guest vocals from Seattle-based solo artist Marlo Kapsa, “Sharpen It,” “Face Down” and “Some Nerve” — on which I’m pretty sure every time the title-line is delivered there’s a “fucking” placed in between the “some” and the “nerve” — there isn’t one song that doesn’t gnash its teeth in punk-born fuckall sneer, but at the same time, hooks also run rampant through Gaglia‘s interwoven layers of sludgy screams and cleaner, drawling vocals. The songs are structured, well composed and memorable while sounding like they don’t give a shit, and that is among the most difficult balances a band can strike without falling flat in terms of craft or coming across as a put-on, which LáGoon don’t, even through such a focus on darker themes.
At seven minutes even — a second less on Bandcamp, if you want to quibble — “I See the Hate in You” is the opener and longest inclusion (immediate points) on Bury Me Where I Drop and it defines a decent portion of what follows. As the introductory guitar lead sings out a chorus melody over the beginning riff, the vibe is post-Electric Wizard, but LáGoon make it move in a way that’s distinct, a swing that shifts directly into the verse to set up the first entry of the sludgier screaming vocal layer, what might be backing vocals but are closer to even in the mix with Gaglia‘s Witch-y cleans carried over from the verse. The pulled notes of a returning lead guitar answer as a bridge to the next verse, and already the song is half over, but crucially, LáGoon have immersed the listener in the ambience that will hold for the rest of what follows.
“I See the Hate in You” lumbers existentially more than in its actual tempo, but knows the strength of its chorus and rides it accordingly, setting up the speedier, more metal-derived semi-gallop of “Dead and Gone,” which begins a series of trades between longer and shorter tracks that continues through the rest of Bury Me Where I Drop, the differences from one to the other not much more than a minute or two at the most, but still crucial the overarching flow that ensues. In another universe, “Dead and Gone” could be the twisted twin incarnation of Queens of the Stone Age, its fade-in subtly underscoring the ambience of the opener even as its time-for-a-ripper sensibility works in purposeful contrast, holding its energy unto the last noodly riff that caps, letting the boogie of the semi-title-track pick up as Coombs and Maurer shuffle and Gaglia and Kapsa do a call and response in the verse and come together in the chorus, like a hellbent and raw rockabilly Archie comic about stabbing, the hook, “And once my heart stops/Just bury me where I drop,” seeming almost innocent despite its obviously bleak crux.
With “Sharpen It,” the guitar begins a procession that’s evident even before Maurer crashes in to punctuate the march. In a more elaborate production style, that moment would hit harder, but LáGoon aren’t about to trade aesthetic for pomp and nor does the song seem to require it. The side B leadoff is relatively fast despite the dirt in its eyes, but hits a slowdown in the fourth of its five minutes to bring it back to the intro’s tempo and that’s about all the resolution you get because fuck you anyway after the harsher verses and chorus and more scorching solo work from Gaglia, who tosses off these leads like it’s nothing even as they create hooks of their own instrumentally.
As the closing duo, “Face Down” and “Some Nerve” reaffirm the nastiness at large, the former starting quiet with standalone guitar as the beginning of a linear build that comes to its peak at about halfway through the four-minute run before receding again, more purposeful than just a jam, but likely born of one and bringing an edge of hypnotic spontaneity to Bury Me Where I Drop ahead of the finale. It is well-placed in a way that reminds of the fact that the band did actually put effort into making the record, efficiently so at a little over three minutes, and it leads to the fading-in distortion of “Some Nerve,” which is a last middle finger at the universe at large and the lyrical “you,” whomever it might be.
A line of what might be sustained organ notes, sweeping layers of lead guitar coming and going, and a throaty sounds-like-it-hurts shout give “Some Nerve” a vibe like a sludged-out Nebula playing Halloweeny ’60s psych, and whether or not that’s precisely what LáGoon were shooting for, that they got there at all is all the more a victory considering how much “Some Nerve” sounds like it’s about to fall apart for nearly every second of its time and doesn’t actually do so even as they pull it to a sudden stop and leave residual swirl as the final element to go; your spiraling consciousness, perhaps, fleeting.
Fair enough. Like a grainy episode of your favorite dark-horror show, watched on a tube television at probably too young an age, Bury Me Where I Drop is melodic and well crafted despite its own seeming protestations to the contrary. Its component tracks are rife with ill-intent and executed with an abiding pessimism, but the album is admirably not-murderous despite this sinister point of view. Wretched catharsis, but catharsis just the same, and it carries forward the intriguing and nuanced progression of LáGoon, whose style is becoming ever more distinctive.
LáGoon, Bury Me Where I Drop (2022)
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