Album Review: Black Sky Giant, The Red Chariot
For the second orbit in a row, Rosario, Argentina, instrumentalists Black Sky Giant greet the New Year with the New Record. And so we climb aboard The Red Chariot. The turnover from 2022 into 2023, a year ago, brought the seemingly-anonymous, DIY-recording-and-releasing outfit’s fifth full-length, Primigenian (review here), which followed on from Jan. 2022’s End of Days Pilgrimage, so they’re well familiar with putting out new music in the industry’s traditional winter doldrums. To wit, they issued their fourth album, Falling Mothership in June 2021, but before that, there was Planet Terror in January of that same year, and I don’t know when in 2020 their debut, Orbiter, first came out, but the reissue was late Dec. 2021 (dates sourced from Bandcamp), which is close enough. Whatever their reason might be — or sometimes a band just falls into these patterns and there isn’t a reason — right now-ish seems to be their spot, and as habit breeds expectation it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that in Jan. 2025, they might have another 40-ish minutes of material behind which march into that unknown and distant-sounding future.
In the meantime, The Red Chariot invites the audience not only to appreciate how prolific Black Sky Giant have been over the last four-plus years — six LPs is nothing to sneeze at in that span, even if you’re not waiting on a lyricist and making it all yourself, etc. — but to process how their style has evolved in that relatively short period of time. Heavy psychedelia, post-rock, krautrock and prog have been factors since the outset, as a revisit to Orbiter will demonstrate, but The Red Chariot takes off with its title-track and harnesses a linear-coursing progressive fluidity that, with its effects wobbles, steady, maybe-programmed drums and root guitar figure coherent beneath the swirl, is a preface for the post-punk melancholic bounce of “A Timeless Oracle” and a hint at some of the spaces songs like “Submerged Towers” or the Euro-style meditative heavy riffing on “Electrical Civilization” will occupy.
Across eight songs and 38 minutes, Black Sky Giant hold firmly to that rhythmic flow that takes hold in “The Red Chariot,” and as the subsequent “Path” broadens the reach in its atmospheric, contemplative stretch, it’s lead guitar taking the place of vocals, but doing so with uncommon soulfulness and melodic expression. It’s not quite trying to sing lines, as some lead guitars do in no-singer units, but in the slow, echo-laced and foggy unfolding of “Path,” the guitar brings character to complement and contrast the heft of the bass that thickens up around three minutes in, and The Red Chariot isn’t through the first half of its first side before the band have managed to establish their presence and (part of their) intention, and it isn’t through its first three minutes before the willing listener is immersed.
As noted, “A Timeless Oracle” builds off the title-track and picks up from the sleepy, bluesy guitar layers that cap “Path” with an immediately decisive beat and shimmering guitar, quickly nestling into a verse that’s more The Cure than Kyuss (not complaining) and that builds to a quick head in its sub-three-minute run, but feels more like an idea being tried out than a fully-realized, fleshed-out piece like the side A finale “Illuminated by Reflection,” which follows, or the arranged-shortest-to-longest-but-it’s-all-dug-in progressive heavy psych that typifies The Red Chariot‘s back half.
Ambience is, has become, crucial, and while the underground sphere in which Black Sky Giant are operating might be under the grand and e’er-expanding umbrella of ‘Heavy,’ the wisps of Colour Haze-y guitar put to dramatic use across the slight Earth tinge of “Illuminated by Reflection” after “A Timeless Oracle” emphasizes the band’s ability to work in multiple niches at the same time. Thus the personality of The Red Chariot is built from its component songs, and it feels is all the more complete with “Submerged Towers” answering back to the delay-guitar and post-whathaveyou vibes of the opener and “A Timeless Oracle.” I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that “Submerged Towers” and “The Red Chariot” itself aren’t part of the same progression. If they’re not, or if one isn’t working off the other, they’re pretty close.
If the pattern would hold, with Black Sky Giant alternating back and forth between prog-psych and heavy-post-punk methodologies, the denser-seeming fuzz of “Electrical Civilization” would hold and flesh out as it does — it is marked by a midsection that dares to be pretty in a way rock can’t always manage before transitioning back to the central riff in a way that recalls earlier Tool — and “Augury” would answer in contradiction. That is not how they roll it out, however, as the penultimate “Augury” arrives with immediate prog-heavy clarity. The turn they’ve made instead is into the atmospheric heavy rock of “Path” and “Illuminated by Reflection,” and the personality of the guitar as it twists into verse lines at about a minute in is no less resonant than in the earlier tracks. Lead-style riffing carries through the midsection and into a broader finish, almost wistful or Southern in its layering, but as much as to auger is to foretell — and one might argue that each Black Sky Giant outing has been an auger for the progression of the next; I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the post-punk here is more manifest next time, but I’ll stop short of predicting — it comes across like a good time being remembered, perhaps as it happened.
Rounding out is the six-minute “In the Sight of the Mountain God,” which feels duly reverential, and if you’d look for sacred mountains, Argentina’s got plenty in its western Andes, among them Aconcagua, which is tallest in the Americas. Whatever burg hosts this particular deity, one assumes that like all gods, it prefers gradual tempos, tonal richness, and a sonic conversation with the ethereal offered through terrestrial means, and sure enough that’s the offering being made by Black Sky Giant, though a shift at three minutes in results in a minor redirection as a setup for the shred-into-the-fade ending. And the noisy finish is somewhat surprising given how controlled and thoughtful the band (who I assume is more than one person, but of course I could be wrong) have been up to that moment, but I suspect that the giving over to that more raucous impulse is the point, and so “In the Sight of the Mountain God” is a fit conceptually as well as in tone and mood.
A lot can and will happen before Jan. 2025 comes around, and it may be that one won’t hear from Black Sky Giant until then if they do another record, if that’s their plan at all. As it stands, the instrumental approach, the narrative slivers posted with the records, and the thematic stylization of the artwork draw The Red Chariot into the context of what Black Sky Giant do as representing their most forward-thinking outing to-date, but it’s clear that the pursuit-of-sound chase that’s brought them here will continue unabated as long as the band itself does.
