Review & Full Album Premiere: Brant Bjork Trio, Once Upon a Time in the Desert
[Click play above to stream Brant Bjork Trio’s Once Upon a Time in the Desert in full. It’s out Friday on Duna Records.]
Yeah, desert rock would probably exist in some form without the contributions to it that Brant Bjork has made over the last 25 years as a solo artist, but it wouldn’t be half as rad. Self-releasing through a reignited Duna Records, he is teamed here with Mario Lalli of Fatso Jetson, Yawning Man (and adjacent projects), and drummer Ryan Güt, who began in the prior incarnation of Bjork‘s solo band, continued with Bjork in the trio Stöner, and has held the position as Brant Bjork Trio evolved from that group, which featured Nick Oliveri (also ex-Kyuss, Mondo Generator, etc.) on bass and vocals.
Mario Lalli and the Rubber Snake Charmers toured with Stöner in 2022, but of course the association goes farther back than even Lalli‘s guest appearance on Bjork‘s first solo record, Jalamanta (reissue review here), which came out through Man’s Ruin Records in 1999, to when they were teenagers. Both are founding figureheads in desert rock, Lalli starting out in the mid-’80s in Yawning Man and Bjork a few years later drumming and songwriting in Kyuss before eventually joining Fu Manchu, also on drums, but while the past laurels are many, Once Upon a Time in the Desert has little time to dwell in its nine songs and 41 minutes.
Produced by Bjork and Lalli and engineered by longtime-associate Mathias Schneeberger (who mastered Jalamanta, as one example), the new album not only establishes a more firm partnership between the two mainstays and their secret weapon of a drummer, but basks in a groove that’s emblematic of how they got to be ambassadors of the genre in the first place. It’s been a long road getting from there to here, bringing these players together in this incarnation of Bjork‘s solo band, and they’ve arrived at a place of a distinctive, classic cool.
And they know it. Once Upon a Time in the Desert doesn’t have a narrative thread drawn across its tracks as the title might lead one to believe, but it does tell a story just the same of who these players are and where they’re at at this point in time. There are self-aware displays of persona in the lyrics, as with “UR Free,” which communicates its message as the album opener directly to the listener — the “you” in this case — however or to whomever it may have originally been written.
In the first of several resounding hooks — see also: “Backin’ the Daze,” “Astrological Blues (Southern California Girl),” and “Sunshine is Making Love to Your Mind,” among others — “UR Free” casts a laid-back vision of active whateverism. Lines like “If you want some fun/Go have some fun today/If you wanna cry/Then let your tears fall from your eyes/We all fall down sometimes,” are inclusive and markedly open in terms of perspective, the kind of perspective that might, in a while, find a mind making love to the sunshine, perhaps blissfully, serenely stoned. It’s not all so peaceful as regards lyrics, as “Magic Surfer Magazine” describes an all-alone kid in the desert looking at a surfing magazine.
Leaving aside the of-personal-significance and often-forgotten experiential wonder of print media –holding a picture of a surfer and wanting to surf — it’s a straightforward contrast between the desert and the ocean, and affecting in the chorus: “So lonely/In my bedroom/Dreamin’ every night/I’m gonna be a surfer too.” I don’t know if Bjork is talking about himself there, and I don’t know if he surfs — he was in Fu Manchu, which I feel like should count for surfer cred either way — but the memory-in-song storytelling frame is one that has typified his work in recent years across projects. Stöner‘s “Rad Stays Rad” from their 2021 debut, Stoners Rule (review here), is a ready example, and part of that pandemic-born outfit’s purpose was a nostalgic stripping down to the core elements of desert rock to begin with; arguable as a kind of looking back. The most obvious instance on Once Upon a Time in the Desert — beyond the title itself — is “Backin’ the Daze.” Duh.
If you’re wondering why it’s Brant Bjork Trio and a more band-like moniker in the vein of Stöner, the answer would seem to be that the roots of the songs are his, whatever Lalli and Güt are bringing to the finished product of the album as a whole. Bjork is also alone in handling vocals. But while the writing modus and attitude are familiar, there’s no discounting the life and tonal presence Mario Lalli brings to the recordings. His bass is very much present in the mix throughout, and in the mini-jam of “Astrological Blues (Southern California Girl),” the low end twists with grace around the central figure on guitar as it proceeds through the song’s back half. The bass and guitar are not in competition by any means.
“Down the Mountain” aligns the three-piece around a likewise fluid nod, and everyone shines, and in the crashout start of “Rock and Roll in the Dirt,” the tones are aligned for suitable grit, Lalli and Güt carrying the rhythm in the midsection as the guitar weaves in and out. A balance between studio clarity and live energy is resonant, and even a straight-ahead early piece like “Higher Lows” has space in its sub-five-minute run to conjure some desert expanse, and the finale “Do You Got Some Fire?” feels even more vital with Güt‘s double-kick underscoring its groove following the pattern of the riff.
The Brant Bjork Trio have over 50 years of experience at this thing between them. To get a whole record of Bjork and Lalli together, well, it’s not the craziest idea ever since they’ve been in each other’s orbit and shared space on albums plenty of times over the course of the last three-plus decades, but it is something special that longtime fans of either’s work in other contexts will be glad to embrace. They are accordingly pro-shop, and has been the case on every Bjork-related recording he’s been part of since 2016’s Tao of the Devil (review here), Güt revels in the swing and is a master at finding the rhythmic dynamics in Bjork‘s riffs. Change is the order of the universe, but one hopes that partnership continues to develop.
And listening to Once Upon a Time in the Desert, it’s easy to apply the same to Lalli and Brant Bjork Trio as a whole. All three of them have other bands, projects, incarnations, whathaveyou, and they’re rarely static in moving between them, but if this album, the touring they’ve done leading up to it and the touring they’ll do probably over the next year to support it are a fleeting moment, it’s one worth appreciating.
