With three massively varied full-lengths already under their collective belt, be-robed Andalusian doom trio Orthodox return with the follow-up to 2009’s Sentencia in the form of Baal. Baal, released like its predecessor through Spanish imprint Alone Records, is comprised of five tracks that follow the band’s charted course of morose exploration, but find them bringing some crunch into their dirges. Where Sentencia had a medieval, blackly-plagued vibe to it, Baal is more directly doomed, though you might not know it from the near-six-minute instrumental opener, “Alto Padre,” which sets a tone of the kind of free jazz ethic Orthodox has been incorporating into their sound since their 2006 debut, Gran Poder. What remains most consistent about Orthodox on Baal is the band’s ability to affect a mood and their truly open creative sensibility. As much as they’re within the doom genre, they’re almost never limited by it, and from bassist Marco Serrato Gallardo’s victorious vocal warble on “Taurus” to the recklessly rhythmic drive of “Hanin Ba’al,” it seems Orthodox could go anywhere at any moment and be able to pull something coherent out of it.

That’s no easy feat when you’re working with this kind of sonic breadth. With just three members in the band – Gallardo is joined as ever by guitarist Ricardo Jimenez Gómez and drummer Borja Diaz Vera – Orthodox manage to completely set an atmosphere both expansive and encompassing, despite a traditionally doomed, spacious feel in the songs. Gómez’s layers of guitar on “Alto Padre” strum and ring freely while Vera rolls on his toms behind, leaving Gallardo to thicken and fill out the song on bass. It’s hard to tell from there where Orthodox might be going with Baal – at least hard to tell correctly – and it’s as though they’re leading from Sentencia directly into this newer material, leaving it up to the first track here to provide the transition from one to the next. If we take “Taurus,” then as the beginning of Baal proper, it’s a lumbering and thoroughly doom face that Orthodox are presenting on their latest work. Gallardo would seem to lead the charge with open bass notes ringing through the breaks and vocals that march as much as they do anything else, but Gómez soon injects one of Baal’s several killer solos and makes his presence known that way. Over time, the members of Orthodox have clearly gotten more comfortable with each other as players, and their interaction is the key to making Baal a success. They never sacrifice artistry or dumb down their playing style to highlight a riff, but neither do they fail to pay homage to the heaviness that was doubtless the impetus behind forming the band in the first place.

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Back in December, I placed an order at the Alone Records online distro. They were (and still are) offering a list of CDs, from which you, the loyal customer, could pick 10 for 59.90 Euro. Seemed like a pretty good deal to me, so I hit it up and made my list — who doesn’t love making lists of records they want to buy? — and filled the shopping cart. 10 albums from the list, no problem. Even with the exchange rate and shipping, I made out about right.

End of January, I started to get nervous that perhaps my local post office had either lost or decided “fuck it” and tossed the package, because it still hadn’t come. Of course, I’ve had dealings with Alone before for the site (and before that as well), so the thought that the label was pulling a fast one never entered my mind. Sure enough, it turned out just to be delays. Weather delays, laziness delays, who the hell knows. The box showed up at my house, postmarked from way back when. Knowing that I’d gotten the last copies of a few of the items contained therein, I was glad to see it.

Here’s what I got, presented alphabetically in the spirit of last week’s Buried Treasure:

Abramis Brama, När Tystnaden Lagt Sig…
Duster 69, Ride the Silver Horses
Lucifer Was, Blues from Hellah
Mangrove, Endless Skies
Mississippi Sludge, Biscuits and Slavery
Negative Reaction, Everything You Need for Galactic Battle Adventures
Ridge, A Countrydelic and Fuzzed Experience in a Colombian Supremo
The Soulbreaker Company, The Pink Alchemist
Sunnshine, No More Forever
Warchetype, Goat Goddess Supremacy

Only the Warchetype and the Soulbreaker Company discs are actually on Alone Records proper, and I bought them because I reviewed (here and here) and enjoyed albums from both bands in the past couple months. There were a couple names I remember from a while ago — Mississippi Sludge, Ridge, Duster 69 — that I figured I’d get just for the hell of it. The Ridge was cool in a Fu Manchu vein, the Mississippi Sludge didn’t match the awesomeness of its cover at all, and Duster 69 was heaviest perhaps in its accent, so I guess that batch kind of had its ups and downs.

The Negative Reaction I’ve owned for years. I’m pretty sure the version I have I bought from the band the first time I saw them at the New Jersey Metalfest in 2003, but it’s in a slimline, and I hadn’t heard it in a while, so I thought a full copy would be a good way to revisit. And man, I had forgotten, but that album is killer. The riffs, Ken-E Bones‘ screaming, the samples, the timing of it, everything just works. Definitely under-mentioned when it comes to the high points of abrasive sludge. They still play a lot of these songs live, and for good reason.

Mangrove‘s album was more generic than I remembered from reviewing it back in 2009. I think I had it mixed up in my mind with either Tekhton or The Deep Blue on The Church Within, but either way, Endless Skies wasn’t helped at all by the fact that I listened to it right after the Abramis Brama, which was essentially a better version of the same kind of post-Soundgarden classic rock ideas. But then, Abramis Brama are one of the best bands in Sweden at that kind of thing, so I probably shouldn’t hold it against their countrymen in Mangrove for not measuring up. Just about nobody does.

So there’s a couple I’ll probably put away and a few I’ll revisit again — Lucifer Was‘ prog strangeness, the Negative Reaction, Warchetype, Abramis Brama, etc. — but on the whole it’s a bunch of music that I hadn’t heard before that I’ve heard now, so no matter what, I came out of it on the plus side. And seriously, if you haven’t dug into Warchetype, you should look them up in the immediate. Goat Goddess Supremacy more than lives up to its name.

Whereas much of the movement in the last several years of heavy psychedelic rock has been toward the more freeform, jamming style of bands like Earthless and Naam, the Vitoria–Gasteiz collective The Soulbreaker Company from the north of Spain present an incredibly tight-wound vision of what space-leaning psych can be on their second Alone Records full-length, Itaca. The six-piece (plus guests) band run through a wide array of sonic motifs, from the jazzy synth-prog of opener “It’s Dirt,” to the Doors-y feel of the ending movement of “Sandstorm,” always maintaining control, always sounding full. Never a hair out of place, so to speak. It’s an accomplishment mostly in the complexity of the song arrangements – I know of plenty two-piece bands who can’t get to the point of togetherness The Soulbreaker Company have with up to eight or nine people on a single track.

Part of that credit has to go to Chris Fielding, who produced Itaca at Foel Studios in Wales (Obiat, Conan, Porcupine Tree) along with the band. The sounds here are crisp but not unnatural, and there’s a remarkable balance between the separation in the instruments and their meshing. The already-noted opener earns kudos not only for its creative breadth, but for being the longest cut on Itaca at 9:38 (I’m almost always a sucker for a band who opens with their longest song instead of tacking it at the end), and cuts like “Oh! Warsaw,” the catchy “Sow the Roses” and the later, piano- and horn-driven “Take a Seat on the Moon” only reinforce the album’s primary statement, that The Soulbreaker Company are a band for whom the limits are few and far between. They have the will (and the personnel) to take listeners on a genuine journey, and the more of Itaca I dig into, the farther-ranging I’m finding it to be. While the classic rock approach of vocalist/guitarist Jony Moreno (backed occasionally by Layla Seville and/or Joanne Deacon) does a lot of the tying together of the different-sounding tracks, there’s also a tonal consistency to the material on Itaca that serves to heighten the drama of the songs while it helps the flow one to the next. Fans of Hypnos 69 will swoon over the guitar work of Daniel Triñanes and Asier Fernandez on “Colours of the Fire” and the sax-playing of Kike Guzman (who might want to think about adopting a nom de guerre) on “It’s Dirt” and “No Way Back Home,” on which the Hammond of Oscar Gil also provides an album highlight.

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Fresh off last year’s three-way split with Lords of Bukkake and Sons of Bronson and single-track Lords of the Cave Worm full-length, Barcelona crushers Warchetype make their latest offering with the album Ancestral Cult of Divinity. Released, like their first two LPs, on Alone Records, the six-cut Ancestral Cult of Divinity showcases the kind of self-awareness you might expect in modern traditional doom, owing much of its sound to a darker interpretation of The Obsessed with nods to Trouble, Candlemass, Saint Vitus and Black Sabbath along the way, but Warchetype don’t shy away from displaying a heavier, death metal influence. This is a big part of what distinguishes them from the legends by whom they’re inspired, and given a long European history for pioneering death/doom, the five-piece is by no means out of line with a slew of preceding acts.

Led by the snail’s pace riffage of guitarists David Bruguera and Jordi Boluda and fronted by the versatile Iban Arrieta, Warchetype cast an effective balance of new school and traditional doom, their roots showing through in the structure and tempo changes of their songs – three of which on Ancestral Cult of Divinity cross the 11-minute mark – and the freshness with which they approach the sound providing that new school feel. Where a lot of trad-doomers feel reinterpreted Sabbath riffs are enough, Warchetype repurposes “Snowblind” into closer “Doom Brotherhood,” a song well aware of the tribute it’s paying and all the more effective for wearing its influence on its sleeve. Likewise, the Wino-style vocal cadence in the verses of “Bastards” makes no bones about its origins.

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Though it follows an intro with the closest thing to the guitar sound on Clutch’s now-classic Elephant Riders I’ve ever heard without actually listening to that album, that turns out to be just one of the many sonic avenues explored on the Spanish trio Cuzo’s second album for Alone Records, Otros Mundos. Taking ‘70s prog jam excursions and roughing them up tonally to achieve a kind of garage jazz, the three-piece has undergone several changes in the time since their debut, Amor y Muerte en la Tercera Fase, most notably exchanging bassist Iván Román for Alvaro Gallego, bringing the number of shared members between Cuzo and doomers Warchetype down a third to just drummer Pep Cervantes. Cervantes and guitarist Jaume Pantaleon explored a variety of instrumental personalities on the first album, and joined here by Gallego, is as though they’re even freer to pursue whatever the moment offers.

On the already-alluded “Astroratas,” that means Clutch groove. On every other track, it means something completely different. “Coche Imaginario” has a strict jam build, but even that’s offset by synth quirk so that in listening you never quite know which way the song will turn. “Del Más Allá” is driven more laterally by Pantaleon’s guitar, but as Cuzo begins to develop an underlying persona beneath these explorations, it’s by no means just about one player. Gallego and Cervantes both play an essential role in making Otros Mundos sound as vitalized and fresh as it does. “Ni Vivos Ni Muertos” feels like a companion piece for “Del Más Allá” because of their relative closeness time-wise, but the two actually don’t share any more in common than either track does with the rest of Otros Mundos.

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It’s a well-known fact that when you begin a sentence with “When you think about it…” whatever you say afterwards is immediately lent credence. Someone out there is going to say, “You know, that’s right.” So:

When you think about it, doom and free jazz really aren’t all that different, are they?

That’s the question Sevilla trio Orthodox try to answer as they bridge the gap between the seemingly disparate sonics on their latest full-length, Sentencia (Alone Records). Comprised of a religiously-themed trinity of tracks — “Marcha de la Santa Sangre,” “Ascensión,” and “…Y la Muerte no Tendrá Dominio” — the record also runs a solid 33 minutes, so we see the theme of threes (threme?) works on multiple levels right from the start.

Of the three songs, “Marcha de la Santa Sangre” might be the most straightforward, as well as being the shortest at 2:41. Both it and “…Y la Muerte no Tendrá Dominio” are essentially frame pieces for the mammoth “Ascensión,” which towers above its companions at 26:28, but “Marcha de la Santa Sangre” has fuzz bass care of Marco Serrato Gallardo (who also handles vocals, but not yet) and Ricardo Jimenez Gómez’s guitar in addition to its trumpet and the funeral marching snare Borja Diaz Vera, and on that level isn’t so far off from the material on either of Orthodox’s last two albums, both of which had a marked jazz influence. What really separates Sentencia from 2006’s Gran Poder and 2007’s Amanecer en Puerta Oscura (both issued in the US via Southern Lord) is the atmosphere of “Ascensión,” which comes to represent that of the album as a whole.

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I always try to pay attention to international exchange rates. Aside from being interested in the political implications thereof, it’s interesting to see what our tiny pieces of paper are worth compared to everyone else’s tiny pieces of paper. Occasionally you can get a bargain too, if you play your cards right.

As of today, the euro is worth $1.36, which isn’t bad. Of course, the market is turbulent (if you don’t believe me, search your favorite news site for the words “Greece” and “economy”), but I managed recently to hit up The Stone Circle, the mailorder of Spanish label Alone Records and come out of it on the positive side of the equation. Not financially, of course, but existentially.

It was Fatso Jetson‘s 1999 outing, Flames for All, that hooked me. Aside from being a Man’s Ruin release — anyone who’s been around this site for a while should know of my Kozik fetish — it’s also the only record they did as a four-piece, the lineup including Mario and Larry Lalli, drummer Tony Tornay and, as the fourth for doubles, Gary Arce of Yawning Man. It’s like a desert party pressed to plastic and I had to have it, so after a relatively exhausting search for comparison prices/conditions, The Stone Circle won out.

And I figured, hey, while I’m on the site, might as well see what else they’ve got lying around, right? If you could have just one CD, they wouldn’t have shaped them so similarly to potato chips (krinkle-cut notwithstanding).

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If we happened to live in a dimension in which there was one phrase to cover the entirety of what Barcelona instrumentalists Cuzo are doing on their Alone Records debut, Amor y Muerte en la Tercera Fase, that phrase might be something like “vague rock.” The experimental trio comprised of bassist Iv?n Rom?n, drummer Pep Cervante (both of doomers Warchetype) and guitarist/noisemaker Jaime L. Pantale?n run through seven mostly-interconnected tracks of instru-prog, like what Stinking Lizaveta might try if they decided they weren’t a jazz band or a more organic, less keyboard-driven Zombi.

The personality of the album varies almost entirely on each song, with opener “Medium” being mostly an ambient/noisy intro with a high-pitched frequency throughout most of it that cuts into the eardrum in a way that makes you think you’re in for something way less pleasant from Amor y Muerte en la Tercera Fase than you actually are. Almost immediately, “Escalera Roja” establishes Cuzo as a semi-technical band capable of switching and bending moods to their will, but still focused more on expression than structure. Riffs repeat and come and go but Cuzo don’t sound rigid in their execution at all, which is a big part of why the album has such a consistent flow despite the array of approaches within.

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