Posted in Whathaveyou on August 15th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
A litany of familiar names playing a litany of familiar tunes, Spaceship Landing: A Tribute to Kyuss is a fairly straightforward concept. Rather than the Magnetic Eye-style ‘redux’ model, the compilation of mostly European bands put together at the behest of Witching Buzz follows the oldschool pattern of more ‘greatest hits’-style selections. I don’t know how many of these songs are exclusive or not, but from Fuzz Evil and Abel Blood to Rhino and King Howl, it’s an assemblage 20-strong put together to honor the band largely credited with defining desert rock for the rest of us mortals out here on the scorched earth.
So like I said, an easy enough concept to grasp. Slated for a Halloween release. The PR wire has it like this:
Spaceship Landing: A Tribute to KYUSS
Release Date and Cover Art Unveiled
A Global Homage to the Godfathers of Desert Rock
The legacy of KYUSS – the pioneers of desert rock and the spiritual fathers of stoner metal – echoes endlessly across generations and continents. Now, over two decades after their final ride into the sonic sunset, a legion of underground bands unites to pay respect in a massive, fuzz-drenched tribute.
“Spaceship Landing: A Tribute to KYUSS” will be released October 31, 2025 by Witching Buzz and features 21 bands from across the globe, each offering a thunderous reimagining of a KYUSS classic. This is not just a tribute – it’s a worldwide celebration of riff worship, sand-blasted psych, and raw desert energy.
Full Tracklist: Amammoth (Australia) – Son of a Bitch Mörkekraft (Norway) – Writhe Sonic Wolves (Italy) – Thumb Rhino (Italy) – Green Machine Gurnslinger (Jersey) – Molten Universe Void Cruiser (Finland) – 50 Million Year Trip (Downside Up) King Howl (Italy) – Freedom Run Rainbow Bridge (Italy) – Apothecaries’ Weight Fuzz Evil (USA) – Supa Scoopa and Mighty Scoop 3 Wheeler Band (Mexico) – 100° DoctoR DooM (France) – Space Cadet Poste 942 (France) – Demon Cleaner ISAAK (Italy) – Odyssey Folwark (Italy) – Whitewater Abel Blood (USA) – Caterpillar March Epic Down (Germany) – Hurricane Loose Sutures (Italy) – One Inch Man Wet Cactus (Spain) – Phototropic Wolfnaut (Norway) – El Rodeo Mercure (France) – Size Queen
With each band offering their own sonic twist while honoring the spirit of KYUSS, Spaceship Landing is a must-listen for desert dwellers, fuzz fanatics, and anyone who’s ever felt the low-end rumble of the California sandstorms in their soul.
Raise your amps. Board the spaceship. KYUSS lives.
Sydney, Australia, sludge rock bruisers Amammoth will release their second album, Distant Skies and the Ocean Flies, on March 21, in continued cooperation with Electric Valley Records. Guess what? They’re heavy.
I know, with a name like Amammoth, somehow that’s not at all shocking even though with the ‘a’- prefix, there’s a suggestion of anti-mammoth. Like, in protest of the mammoth. Fuck this mammoth! I shall be the opposite! An amammoth!, and so on. (And yeah, I know I said as much when I reviewed The Fire Above in 2021.) But no, in fact Amammoth have way more in common in terms of sonic largesse with a mammoth than an amammoth, which isn’t a thing that ever existed so far as I know but if it did would surely cower beneath the grunt, roll and flourish of “Among Us” (video premiering below), the nine-minute post-intro opener and longest track on Distant Skies and the Ocean Flies. Drawing its expanse from sludge and doom and maybe even a little death metal in there somewhere of the European strain, pushing into psychedelia with organ and keys later on so that while Scott Fisher is gutting out vocals Kirk Windstein-style, what accompanies is trippier riffing (plus a bit of triangle, I think? maybe keyboard-triangle?) than one might necessarily expect. But that’s what one gets for having expectations in the first place. Gotta let that go. Zen and crushing riffs.
So there they are, Fisher, bassist Warwick Poulton (making his first appearance) and drummer Scott Wilson, hammering away at your cortex after setting an atmos-sludge course in the aptly-titled “Intro” like someone put an organ behind Souls at Zero, but “Among Us” isn’t post-metallic in its lumber necessarily, and its riffing leans more to Sleep than Neurosis, if we want to keep the comparisons to Jason Roeder bands. There’s something oldschool about the largely unipolar vocals — it’s gruff shouts and such, as noted, not screams for the most part, but not entirely “clean” singing either — like in the early ’90s when you could just get away with barking for an entire record; for what it’s worth, in the 40 minutes and eight songs of Distant Skies and the Ocean Flies, there’s enough variation in what Amammoth do around their central purpose in largesse that nothing feels like it’s missing.
“Among Us” caps with repetitions of “Walk among us” and a few homeward slams to make the point before they rumble to the finish, “Chosen” picking up almost immediately with its own muted crashes on the way to reveling in its combination of swinging drums and slogging riffs; the shift from what would be the closer on a lot of records (and is here the opener but for “Intro”) into the more-than-three-minutes-shorter track that follows letting Amammoth cast an open impression and then strip it down for a more direct attack.
To wit, “Chosen,” “So High So Numb” and the pointedly primordial “Sink or Swim” are positioned to feel comparatively immediate regardless of their actual tempos, and Amammoth bask in the lumbering reaches their tonal worship lets them conjure. And “Sink or Swim” coming through as so much of an epitome in this regard means “Satellite,” which follows, is a well-timed change.
Amid more Crowbar-esque seething and declarative steamrolling, the organ returns — joining the fray in a brazenly classic-heavy-rock manner that I can’t help but feel like would make Oppu from Amorphis/Octoploid smile in this context — and deftly calls back to “Among Us” before hitting its culmination and giving over to the penultimate “Ashes Remain,” which might be the rawest and angriest of the eight inclusions, and which serves as the whole-album crescendo accordingly before the thud-backed drone and noisemaking of “Interstitial” reinforce the atmospheric depth for three minutes on the band’s way out.
For a record that’s so much about throwing elbows, some of them at your larynx (heads up on that), the movement across Distant Skies and the Ocean Flies is remarkably easy. I guess the degree of that will be somewhat subject to one’s own tolerance for harder-edged fare, rough vocals, and so on, but Amammoth are perhaps not as monolithic in their approach as they would have you believe. In that case, “Among Us” represents the totality of Distant Skies and the Ocean Flies well, summarizing a lot of what the tracks that follow have on offer without giving away everything at the album’s outset.
The video has a flashing lights warning, and it comes up more later in the clip but they’re not kidding. More info follows from the PR wire below.
Please enjoy:
Amammoth, “Among Us” video premiere
Amammoth on “Among Us”:
Our second single “Among Us” is a B-grade psychedelic, sci-fi adventure, kind of like ET on acid.
Sydney’s sludgiest stoner outfit Amammoth’s trippy sonic sensibilities and intellectually vitriolic lyrical approach blur the boundaries between sedation and stimulation, simultaneously submerging listeners into the distorted depths of the human experience while lifting them up with a distinctly groovy vibe and clean vocal style that shines through both in the studio and on stage. Following the release of their debut EP and their first full-length album, as well as a host of electrically frenzied live shows, Amammoth’s momentum is at an all-time high as they prepare for their biggest year yet, with a second full-length album set for release with Electric Valley Records, to be officially announced in due time, much to the delight of their diverse and growing global fanbase.
Tracklisting: 1. Intro 2. Among Us 3. Chosen 4. So High So Numb 5. Sink or Swim 6. Satellite 7. Ashes Remain 8. Interstitial
Amammoth are: Scott Fisher : vocals/guitar Warwick Poulton : bass Scott Wilson : drums
Amammoth, Distant Skies and the Ocean Flies (2025)
Posted in Reviews on March 31st, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Third day, and you know what that means. Today we hit and pass the halfway mark of this Quarterly Review. I won’t say it hasn’t been work, but it seems like every time I do one of these lately I continue to be astounded by how much easier writing about good stuff makes it. I must’ve done a real clunker like two years ago or something. Can’t think of one, but wow, it’s way more fun when the tunes are killer.
To that end we start with Dopelord today, haha. Have fun digging through if you do.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
Dopelord, Reality Dagger
They put it in a 12″, and that’s cool, but in addition to the fact that it’s about 22 minutes long, something about Reality Dagger, the latest EP from Poland’s Dopelord, strikes me as being really 10″ worthy. I know 10″ is the bastard son of vinyl pressings — doesn’t fit with your LPs and doesn’t fit with your 7″s. They’re a nuisance. Do they get their own shelf? Mixed in throughout? Well, however you organize them, I think a limited 10″ of Reality Dagger would be perfect, because from the melodies strewn throughout “Dark Coils” and the wildly catchy “Your Blood” — maybe the most complex vocal arrangement I’ve yet heard from the band — to the ultra-sludge interplay with screams on the 10-minute closing title-track, it sounds to me like standing out from the crowd is exactly what Dopelord want to do. They want to be that band that doesn’t fit your preconceptions of stoner-doom, or sludge, or modern heavy largesse in the post-Monolord vein. Why not match that admirable drive in format? Oh hell, you know what? I’ll just by the CD and have done with it. One of the best EPs I’ve heard this year.
Don’t be surprised when you see Kozmik Artifactz, Nasoni Records, or some other respected probably-European purveyor of heavy coming through with an announcement they’ve picked up Scorched Oak. The Dortmund, Germany, trio seem to have taken the last few years to figure out where they were headed — they pared down from a five-piece, for example — and their rolling tides of fuzz on late-2020’s debut LP Withering Earth bears the fruit of those efforts. Aesthetically and structurally sound, it’s able to touch on heavy blues, metal and drifting psychedelia all within the span of a seven-minute track like “Swamp,” and in its five-songs running shortest to longest, it effectively draws the listener deeper into the world the band are creating through dual vocals, patient craft and spacious production. If I was a label, I’d sign them for the bass tone on 14-minute closer “Desert” alone, never mind any of the other natural phenomena they portray throughout the record, which is perhaps grim in theme but nonetheless brimming with potential. Some cool riffs on this dying planet.
A scorching set culled from two nights of performances in their native Nashville, what’s essentially serving as Kings of the Fucking Sea‘s debut long-player, In Concert, is a paean to raw psychedelic power trio worship. High order ripper groove pervades “Witch Mountain” and the wasn’t-yet-named “Hiding No More” — which was introduced tentatively as “Death Dealer,” which the following track is actually titled. Disorienting? Shit yeah it is. And shove all the poignancy of making a live album in Feb. 2020 ahead of the pandemic blah blah. That’s not what’s happening here. This is all about blow-the-door-so-we-can-escape psychedelic pull and thrust. One gets the sense that Kings of the Fucking Sea are more in control than they let on, but they play it fast and loose and slow and loose throughout In Concert and by the time the mellower jam in “I Walk Alone” opens up to the garage-style wash of crash cymbal ahead of closer “The Nile Song,” the swirling fuckall that ensues is rampant with noise-coated fire. A show that might make you look up from your phone. So cool it might be jazz. I gotta think about it.
They bill themselves as ‘Mantarraya – power trío,’ and guitarist/vocalist Herman Robles Montero, drummer/maybe-harmonica-ist Kelvin Sifuentes Pérez and bassist/vocalist Enzo Silva Agurto certainly live up to that standard on their late-2020 self-titled debut full-length. The vibe is classic heavy ’70s through and through, and the Peruvian three-piece roll and boogie through the 11 assembled tracks with fervent bluesy swing on “En el Fondo” and no shortage of shuffle throughout the nine-minute “120 Años (Color),” which comes paired with the trippier “Almendrados” in what seems like a purposeful nod to the more out-there among the out there, bringing things back around to finish swinging and bouncing on the eponymous closer. I’ll take the classic boogie as it comes, and Mantarraya do it well, basking in a natural but not too purposefully so sense of underproduction while getting their point across in encouraging-first-record fashion. At over an hour long, it’s too much for a single LP, but plenty of time for them to get their bearings as they begin their creative journey.
At the risk of repeating myself, someone’s gonna sign Häxmästaren. You can just tell. The Swedish five-piece’s second album, Sol i Exil (“sun in exile,” in English), is a mélange of heavy rock and classic doom influences, blurring the lines between microgenres en route to an individual approach that’s still accessible enough in a riffer like “Millennium Phenomenon” or “Dödskult Ritual” to be immediately familiar and telegraph to the converted where the band are coming from. Vocalist Niklas Ekwall — any relation to Magnus from The Quill? — mixes in some screams and growls to his melodic style, further broadening the palette and adding an edge of extremity to “Children of the Mountain,” while “Growing Horns” and the capper title-track vibe out with with a more classic feel, whatever gutturalisms happen along the way, the latter feeling like a bonus for being in Swedish. In the ever-fertile creative ground that is Gothenburg, it should be no surprise to find a band like this flourishing, but fortunately Sol i Exil doesn’t have to be a surprise to kick ass.
Launching with the nine-minute instrumental “Benares” is a telling way for Kyiv’s Shiva the Destructor to begin their debut LP, since it immediately sets listener immersion as their priority. The five-track/44-minute album isn’t short on it, either, and with the band’s progressive, meditative psychedelic style, each song unfolds in its own way and in its own time, drawn together through warmth of tone and periods of heft and spaciousness on “Hydronaut” and a bit of playful bounce on “Summer of Love” (someone in this band likes reggae) and a Middle Eastern turn on “Ishtar” before “Nirvana Beach” seems to use the lyrics to describe what’s happening in the music itself before cutting off suddenly at the end. Vocals stand alone or in harmony and the double-guitar four-piece bask in a sunshine-coated sound that’s inviting and hypnotic in kind, offering turns enough to keep their audience following along and undulations that are duly a clarion to the ‘others’ referenced in the title. It’s like a call to prayer for weirdo psych heads. I’ll take that and hope for more to come.
The first and only lyric in “Heal” — the opening track of Sydney, Australia, trio Amammoth‘s debut album, The Fire Above — is the word “marijuana.” It doesn’t get any less stoned from there. Riffs come in massive waves, and even as “The Sun” digs into a bit of sludge, the largesse and crash remains thoroughly weedian, with the lumbering “Shadows” closing out the first half of the LP with particularly Sleep-y nod. Rawer shouted vocals also recall earlier Sleep, but something in Amammoth‘s sound hints toward a more metallic background than just pure Sabbath worship, and “Rise” brings that forward even as it pushes into slow-wah psychedelics, letting “Blade Runner” mirror “The Sun” in its sludgy push before closer “Walk Towards What Blinds You (Blood Bong)” introduces some backing vocals that fit surprisingly well even they kind of feel like a goof on the part of the band. Amammoth, as a word, would seem to be something not-mammoth. In sound, Amammoth are the opposite.
With emotional stakes sufficiently high throughout, MCMXIII is urgent enough to be post-hardcore, but there’s an underpinning of progressive heavy rock even in the mellower stretch of the eight-minute “Dogfight” that complements the noisier and more angular aspects on display elsewhere. Opener “Post Blue Collar Blues” sets the plotline for the newcomer Dayton, Ohio, four-piece, with thoughtful lyrics and a cerebral-but-not-dead-of-spirit instrumental style made full and spacious through the production. Melodies flesh out in “Cripple John” and “Old Face on the Wall,” brooding and surging in children-of-the-’90s fashion, but I hear a bit of Wovenhand in that finale as well — though maybe the one doesn’t exclude the other — so clearly Nineteen Thirteen are just beginning this obviously-passion-fueled exploration of sound aesthetic with these songs, but the debut EP they comprise cuts a wide swath with marked confidence and deceptive memorability. A new turn on Rust Belt heavy.
Hey, you process trauma from living through the last year your way and Genova, Italy’s Ikitan will process it theirs. In their case, that means the writing, recording and self-release of their 20-minute single-song EP, Twenty-Twenty, a sprawling work of instrumentalist heavy post-rock rife with spacious, airy lead guitar and a solid rhythmic foundation. Movements occur in waves and layers, but there is a definite thread being woven throughout the outing from one part to the next, held together alternately by the bass or drums or even guitar, though it’s the latter that seems to be leading those changes as well. The shifts are fluid in any case, and Ikitan grow Twenty-Twenty‘s lone, titular piece to a satisfyingly heft as they move through, harnessing atmosphere as well as weight even before they lower volume for stretches in the second half. There’s a quick surge at the end, but “Twenty-Twenty” is more about journey than destination, and Ikitan make the voyage enticing.
Loops, far-out spaces and a generally experimentalist feel ooze outward like Icelandic lava from Bodkin, the five-song debut LP from UK-based solo-outfit Smote. The gentleman behind the flow is Newcastle upon Tyne’s Daniel Foggin, and this is one of three releases he has out so far in 2021, along with a prior drone collaboration tape with Forest Mourning and a subsequent EP made of two tracks at around 15 minutes each. Clearly a project that can be done indoors during pandemic lockdown, Smote‘s material is wide-ranging just the same, bringing Eastern multi-instrumentalism and traditionalist UK psych together on “Fohrt” and “Moninna,” which would border on folk but for all that buzz in the background. The 11-minute “Motte” is a highlight of acid ritualizing, but the droning title-track that rounds out makes each crash count all the more for the spaces that separate them. I dig this a lot, between you and me. I get vibes like Lamp of the Universe here in terms of sonic ambition and resultant presence. That’s not a comparison I make lightly, and this is a project I will be following.
