Yeah, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing about Been Obscene coming to the States that I don’t think is frickin’ awesome. Maybe the fact that they’re not doing two months’ worth of shows, but even that’s understandable since they’re coming a long way to get here and, well, you can travel a bit too to see them. It won’t kill you. For example, I’ll be making my way south to Philly to catch them on the last night of their tour with Borracho, Supervoid and a little band you may have heard me mention once or twice called Clamfight.

I’ve no doubt that will be amazing, and as Been Obscene will be joined on the West Coast by recent Ripple Music acquisitions Ape Machine, it looks like they’re in good company all around. All the better. Would be nice to have this kind of thing happen more often.

The Salzburg four-piece sent over the following update:

BEEN OBSCENE HITTING US GROUND

Austria’s alternative psychedelic rockers playing US tour in March.

For their first time BEEN OBSCENE are hitting US stages in a two weeks long tour, starting in Fort Worth, Texas going all the way up the west coast to Seattle, then head over to the east coast and play three more shows in Washington D.C., Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

“Even though we don’t really have a clue what to expect, we are already crazy excited about this. We can’t wait to hit the stages with such great bands as Ape Machine, who accompany us the whole west coast part and Borracho, who tour the east coast with us.” says Rob, drummer of the band.

To promote the tour the young Austrians just presented their new live video of Demons, perhaps the song they are most known for, which was shot and recorded live at the X-MAS Ride concert at Feierwerk Munich.

They are also already confirmed for this year’s Stoned From The Underground festival, the Swanflight in Schwandorf (GER) in March, right the night before they start their US tour as well as the Lake On Fire Festival in Waldhausen (AT) in August.

More BEEN OBSCENE infos on their dedicated FACEBOOK page.

Usually, I’d wait to wrap up the week until tonight, when, probably at least mildly intoxicated, I’d pull my laptop up off the floor onto the bed while The Patient Mrs. sleeps and post the above fullscreen-worthy Been Obscene clip from the On the Rocks festival in the band’s native Austria. The track is one of two that drummer Robert Schoosleitner was kind enough to bring to my attention this week — the other, “Endless Scheme,” is here — and the laid back grooves from their latest offering, Night o’Mine (review here), are just the thing to wrap up a hectic few days. Well, that and a couple office beers, anyway.

But like I said, under general circumstances, this would all — including the beer — be happening much later tonight. Fact of today, however, is that there’s too much going on next week that I want to plug and I don’t want to forget anything, so here we are, wrapping the week with the work day. Granted, in going for maximum consciousness, I’d probably have been better off three hours ago, but I’ll do the best with what I’ve got. I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty considerable list.

Barring any emergency gotta-review-it-now-type of intrusions (Stubb walks by and waves, charmingly), the plan is to write up records from Bushfire, Fire Faithful, Venomous Maximus and Pallbearer, along with that Hail!Hornet/Zoroaster/Slow Southern Steel show in Brooklyn. I’ll hopefully be interviewing Joey Toscano of Dwellers early in the week, and if that comes together, I’ll have it posted by the end of Friday, and on Tuesday, I’ll have a track premiere from Snail‘s excellent new album, Terminus. The band let me take my pick of the songs and, of course, I chose the longest one of the bunch. I think you’ll agree when you hear it that my decision was justified.

There’s more. Tommy Southard‘s beer column, which is to be called “Drinking with the Devil (Dick),” will go live on Wednesday and boldly blaze a trail into territory The Obelisk has never covered before, and I’ll both announce the winner of the King Giant giveaway and have a new giveaway for copies of the Rising album, To Solemn Ash, which was streamed a couple weeks ago. Couple that with the prospect of news, videos, audio and whatever else I forgot to write on my little post-it note here, and you’ve got a pretty busy few days. You see, I hope, why I didn’t want to forget anything.

And before I go, let me add too that if you haven’t checked it out, there’s a whole slew of news that’s gone up on the forum in the last couple days. Everything from Antigama re-signing with Selfmadegod to Tenacious D putting out a new album to the new Saint Vitus single and more. Worth investigating if you’ve got a couple minutes, anyway.

Whether you do or not, I hope you have a great and safe weekend. I’ll see you on the forum and back here Monday for more space truckin’. We do it every day.

Night o’Mine is the second album through Elektrohasch from Austrian foursome Been Obscene in as many years. Their 2010 debut, The Magic Table Dance (review here), put them in league with a steadily growing ilk of warmly-toned jam-minded European heavy psych acts – bands like Asteroid and The Machine taking fuzz and freedom from Colour Haze and Kyuss and injecting them with the fresh energy of new bands still finding their sounds. Been Obscene (also sometimes written as the one word BeenObscene) were anything but obscene on The Magic Table Dance, and with Night o‘Mine, the same lineup returns after a not insignificant amount of road time with a crisper approach and some more solidified songwriting. Like the first album, the sophomore outing is comprised of eight tracks, but guitarist Thomas Nachtigal – his name translating to “nightingale” befitting the record’s nocturnal schematic – has stepped up on the vocals and the sense of structure overall is stronger for it. Nachtigal is joined in Been Obscene by guitarist Peter Kreyci, bassist/vocalist Philipp Zezula and drummer Robert Schoosleitner, and the four work remarkably well together, the guitarists playing off each other with marked chemistry while the bass and drums solidify and add to the build of a song like “Snake Charmer,” which presents the jammier side of what turns out to be a strong balance between the straightforward and the more openly-approached.

But right away, opener “Endless Scheme” shows a definite increase in stylistic complexity. The song begins with an angular, energetic burst before transitioning into a cymbal-crashing groove that seems held up by guitar leads and Schoosleitner’s steady rhythm and finally shifting into hi-hat taps and contrasting ambience and My Sleeping Karma-esque heavy rock smoothness. There are vocals early on, and they come back at the end for a chorus return, and that works well to show how much Been Obscene have grown; The Magic Table Dance opened instrumentally and felt less structurally aware overall. Likewise, the work that Zezula adds not only through the engaging warmth of his bass, but also with vocals backing Nachtigal during the chorus of “Endless Scheme” is an example of how Been Obscene have been able to develop in just the year since their last offering. Though it starts out quiet, in its latter moments, “Snake Charmer” (7:40) finds the instruments paying off a momentum the vocals helped craft early on, and though “Cut the Rope” is so quick at 3:23 that were it not also as effectively composed and as catchy as it is, it would simply pass unnoticed, “Apathy” follows and finds Nachtigal adding his vocals to a musical drama not unlike that at the end of “Snake Charmer,” and one that works in a shorter amount of time to develop a similar vibrancy, despite a somewhat darker atmosphere. The repeated line, “Breaking down your foolish apathy,” becomes a sort of centerpiece credo the rest of Night o’Mine works around and hits especially heavy surrounded by the start-stop Queens of the Stone Age-isms of “Cut the Rope” and the title-track, on which the speaker cones sound like they’re about to catch fire for the analog push of the material.

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