Review & Full Album Premiere: Dead Shrine, Cydonia Mensa
[Click play below to stream Dead Shrine’s Cydonia Mensa in full. Album is out tomorrow through Kozmik Artifactz and can be ordered here: https://kozmik-shop.com/search/?qs=dead+shrine.]
Prolific songwriter Craig Williamson offers Cydonia Mensa as the second full-length from the heavy-swinging, psych-rocking Dead Shrine, his third solo-project. It follows behind the project’s 2023 debut, The Eightfold Path (review here), and the 2024 collaboration Lamp of the Universe Meets Dr. Space (review here), for which the Hamilton, New Zealand-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist donned his long-running acid-folk band persona shortly after reissuing the debut album from his turn-of-the-century-era heavy rock outfit, Datura, on Ripple Music. One could go further back — Lamp of the Universe‘s second LP has a reissue out on Sound Effect Records, and that project’s last album, Kaleidoscope Mind (review here), came out later in 2023 after The Eightfold Path — but to place Cydonia Mensa in Williamson‘s oeuvre, it’s not difficult to hear the love of heavy psychedelic forms driving the material.
That is to say, Williamson sounds like he’s having a blast across the eight songs and 42 minutes that comprise the album. Despite the full-band sound, the committed DIYer is able to hone a sense of intimacy in the penultimate “Evolution Garden” that harkens back to earlier Lamp-style acoustic-based fare while also reinterpreting at its root the strum from Alice in Chains‘ “Rooster.” That’s a dig-in unto itself on the album, but by no means does it take that long for the fun to make itself known.
The opening cut, “Serpents of the Sun” is a hooky blowout that introduces itself with a crash-in and almost immediate movement into the verse. Big swing, big tones, and plenty of space in the mix for all of it. It’s a rocker and he knows it and there’s more to come. Some bawdiness in the vocals, a little burl tossed in, perhaps, adds to the song’s encouraging push, and soon, “Cydonia Mensa” picks up with its lower-ended, slower roll, with choice backing vocals and time kept on the bell of the ride.
It’s a sleek, grooving classic stoner boogie, and it speaks to genre in a way that Williamson‘s last outwardly heavy-rocking project, the trio Arc of Ascent, wasn’t necessarily willing to do. And where Lamp of the Universe explores spiritual ideas through music drawing from folk traditions, space experimentalism, melted-cortex psych, and so on, Dead Shrine expresses itself in the motion of its riff worship.
I’ll say as well I can’t remember the last time I heard a drummer have as much fun as Williamson sounds like he’s having wailing on his snare coming out of the first verse of “Sacred Light.” It’s a short stretch on the cowbell-infused third cut, from a couple seconds before it hits the one-minute mark until about 1:10 when the next verse starts, but that pop-pop-pop surrounded by the crashing of cymbals and the kick beneath, to me, is exactly what Dead Shrine is all about in terms of Williamson‘s raw enjoyment.
The end-product is different enough to be a different band, but the joy of exploration is the same. It’s there in “Sacred Light,” as well as in the “Yeah, baby!” of the title-cut, the way “Monuments” subtly brings in sitar drone and a synthier psychedelia — it might be mellotron behind the more forward instrumentation of the mix, but if not, it’s some other kind of vintage whathaveyou leading into the appropriately wah-drenched solo — expanding the relatively straight-ahead scope up to that point ahead of pushing further out on side B, swaggering in “Temple of Saturn” with a shove in the chorus rawer vocal.
The vocals feel like a standout. Not so much because they’re radically changed from what Williamson has done before in Dead Shrine or Arc of Ascent or even latter-day Lamp of the Universe, but as someone constantly redrawing the lines and adjusting the balances between the various intentions of his craft, the vocal performance here is striking in its confidence, and while he’s long since been able in the studio to do the work of a complete band one layer at a time and mix it together to get a players-in-room feel, I don’t know if Williamson has ever sounded as much like a frontman as he does on Cydonia Mensa.
Returning in “Redeemer,” the backing vocals of the title-track highlight just how forward the leads are and how much of Cydonia Mensa‘s personality derives from the attitude on display and the strut that coincides with the rampant swing in these songs. For that alone, the impression is that Williamson has figured out something about what he wants Dead Shrine to be in terms of method, and while it’s ultimately well within the reach of his songwriting as demonstrated up to this point — that is, he’s not taking on an entirely new stylistic approach to writing heavy music — it’s emblematic of what drives him that after more than a quarter-century of banging away at various ideas and projects and directions, he’s able to create a piece like the near-eight-minute capper “Illumination Through Knowledge,” which makes a point of uniting all the sides for one final outbound march into the noise and hand-percussion that ends the album.
In the interest of honesty, you should know that I approach this second Dead Shrine album as a fan, but given the reception of the debut, I don’t think I’m alone in that. The fact that Williamson is still exploring and still finding new ways to write and arrange songs that are both fresh and so distinctively his own underscores in my mind his singular contributions to the heavy underground, and the resonant joy of some of Cydonia Mensa‘s heaviest moments — I’m not taking away from “Evolution Garden” there; the penultimate track is essential to the flow for side B and putting the listener in the proper headspace for the closer — adds a feeling of serenity that not even the most blissed-out effects could hope to hone. Whether you’ve followed Dead Shrine since its inception or you’ve never heard of Williamson, this or any of his other projects, it doesn’t matter. The album will still grab you if you let it. I advise you do.
Tags: Astral Projection, Cydonia Mensa, Dead Shrine, Dead Shrine Cydonia Mensa, Hamilton, Kozmik Artifactz, New Zealand
