Kyuss didn’t invent desert rock, but they did codify it. They gave it shape. I don’t think that, coming off of 1991’s first album, Wretch (discussed here), the four-piece sat down and said, “Okay, now this is our sound and we’re going to have this much fuzz and this much of John yelling about random stuff,” but the then-four-piece of drummer Brant Bjork, bassist Nick Oliveri, guitarist Josh Homme and vocalist John Garcia, in collaboration with producer Chris Goss, who by then had already made a name for himself with Masters of Reality, organically, in punk rock-style, made a blueprint that bands from today’s heavy rock giants to demos waiting in my inbox have followed, the world over.

So while Kyuss weren’t the first desert rock band, they’re inarguably the most pivotal. About 20 years earlier it happened with a band called Black Sabbath absorbing the heft and darker sounds around them and winding up largely credited with inventing heavy metal. In neither case is the narrative actually so simple, like Brant Bjork scribbled the words ‘stoner rock’ on his high school notebook and the biopic takes off from there. But people need stories like that to make things make sense. The Ramones, Black Sabbath, Rush, The Beatles, Kyuss, Nirvana, Metallica — these names have become iconic over time, and Blues for the Red Sun, the second Kyuss album, released in 1992 through Dali Records, is where Kyuss‘ legacy really begins.

It is the first of a triptych kept holy by genre heads — Blues for the Red Sun in 1992, 1994’s self-titled/Welcome to Sky Valley (previously discussed here) and 1995’s …And the Circus Leaves Town — all three with Goss producing, and at this point, it is ingrained in the culture of underground heavy. Most of the ‘mother of them all’-type plaudits it has received over the years are right. The drift in the guitar at the outset of “Thumb.” “Freedom Run” fading in from that weirdo jam. “Allen’s Wrench” taking off at a sprint after the acoustic divergence of “Capsized.” The way instrumental “Molten Universe” seems to discover the largesse of its own roll in pulling away from the this-isn’t-grunge-and-it-isn’t-metal-it’s-something-else hookiness of “Thumb” and the urging-to-breakout chug of “Green Machine,” which, if this record didn’t already have a song called “Freedom Run,” would surely have earned the title regardless.

I’ll admit it had been a while, and a revisit feels a bit like kissing the ring for a record that many among the converted probably don’t even have to put on to hear in their heads, but the details are lost in mental jukebox manifestations, and Blues for the Red Sun has enough actual character in the band’s craft, delivery and production, that it’s worth appreciating the songs on their own level. Kyuss brought something different to post-Sabbath riffing than, say, Monster Magnet or C.O.C., with a languid flow to songs that didn’t necessarily have to be languid to harness it and a depth of tone in the guitar and specifically in Oliveri‘s bass — the wubbing swell in “Thong Song,” the way “Apothecaries’ Weight” seems to rest on a bed of low end, etc. — that became a defining element of the genre largely in Kyuss‘ wake.

And perhaps its a symptom of the era in which it was made — the early-1990s ascent of the compact disc as the format of choice over vinyl LPs — that it runs 50 minutes long, but part of what makes Blues for the Red Sun such a dynamic listen is the simple fact that its songs are going different places. It’s not the kind of record where you look at the tracklisting and every song is four and a half or five minutes long, there are seven or eight of them and that’s your record. “Thumb,” “Green Machine,” the structured parts of “Freedom Run,” “Allen’s Wrench,” even the where’s-the-guitar quirk of “Thong Song” and the bleary-eyed blowout that caps the record in the Oliveri-penned-and-vocalized “Mondo Generator” — the quick epilogue “Yeah” notwithstanding — give landmarks along the way, whether that’s a hook like in “Freedom Run” or a riff like in “Green Machine” or a standout thrust and careen like “Allen’s Wrench,” the four-piece work their way into and out of various aural adventures around the core groove in their approach.

Blues for the Red Sun isn’t perfect and it wouldn’t work if it was. As the first of three instrumentals — “Caterpillar March” digs in between “Apothecaries’ Weight” and “Freedom Run” to create arguably the most stoned part of the album, while the aforementioned “Capsized” is a 55-second guitar meditation rerouting from the fuzz and mellower vocals of “Writhe” to the full-sprint of “Allen’s Wrench,” which 33 years later retains its vibrancy and ferocity in kind. Reflecting varied stylistic intent on the part of the band, with Homme and Bjork as principal songwriters, Kyuss were able to create a fluid and immersive sense of place with their sophomore full-length in a way that neither their demo nor Wretch could.

Part of that, invariably, is owed to Goss‘ production, which gives clarity to the noise that Wretch wrought and seems to have had a hand in shaping some of the material as well. The instrumentals, interludes, and ‘parts-between’ as one song transitions to the next become crucial to the listening experience when one is taking it as a whole, but Blues for the Red Sun is just as likely to ensnare an audience with a catchier stretch than the hypnotic riff ride of “Caterpillar March.” That Kyuss could embody both things at this stage in their tenure is emblematic of the special band they were becoming and already were. They weren’t done growing, but there are arguments to be made for Blues for the Red Sun as Kyuss‘ peak, before the ascent to a major label brought new pressures, ambitions and the shrugging shoulders of a corporate music industry in decline.

This is the first time Kyuss really showed who they were on an album. Things would change quickly from here as Scott Reeder (Across the River, The Obsessed, Unida, Goatsnake, etc.) took over on bass and self-awareness crept into their their craft, and Blues for the Red Sun stands as a moment that would not come again and an unmistakable, still-expanding influence across generations of fans and artists. That jam in “Freedom Run?” That’s the freedom, man. Tastes like kicked up dust.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

This might’ve been my favorite Quarterly Review ever, and by that I mean it was absurdly easy to get through. I had three Hungarian classes this week and my 78-year-old mother wound up in the hospital after passing out behind the wheel and crashing into somebody (two broken ribs and a cracked sternum later, everybody’s very glad we got the Volvo because the car’s totaled and she isn’t; the other person in the accident was also okay), had the normal rounds of to-and-from-school driving and whatever else, and I still managed to finish further ahead than I think I ever have before. Momentum was good, the music was good, and I felt good writing. Pretty much the ideal.

I don’t know if that’s it for the year on QRs or not. I need to look at next month for real, when I’m going to put the poll and my own year-end list up, and still manage to review a few things before that happens. I’ll get there. Next week is Thanksgiving, so I might have a couple minutes with that going on. Or, more likely, not and I’ll wing it. Whatever.

Zelda update: I beat Ocarina of Time last night. No cheat codes. I hadn’t played it since high school and beat Ganondorf without taking damage, though his last phase as Ganon had me down to a quarter-heart (with two fairies in bottles to revive as necessary) before I delivered the final blow. It was a decent run. I died only once, to Bongo Bongo in the Shadow Temple. That was Tuesday night, maybe? I was so bummed I wrote an essay about it and sent it to ZeldaDungeon, whose walkthroughs I’ve been using, to see if they would publish it as an editorial. Haven’t heard back yet. If they don’t, I might put it here. But after doing Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, doing Ocarina of Time seemed very much to be getting to the root of it all. The gameplay was refined across those mainline games — in that regard, Twilight Princess might’ve been the most fluid — but Ocarina was where Zelda started to make a canon, a timeline, and a lot of the ‘Zelda stuff’ that typifies the franchise now, even in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom comes from Ocarina of Time.

I was struck by how much of it felt like levels. Like each dungeon was a callback to the original Legend of Zelda for being a series of dungeons tied together through journeying across an overworld. I guess that’s the format of all the games, to a point, but it felt especially prevalent this time. I played the remake for the 3DS both as a quality of life thing and to use a graphics mod to make it pretty, which it did. And brighter as well. I was thinking of going right into Majora’s Mask 3D — which I never played; I finished Ocarina of Time in 1999, decided I never needed to play another Zelda game again, and didn’t until we played Breath of the Wild as a family — though The Pecan was vehement in arguing she wanted me to do A Link Between Worlds — a partial remake of the SNES game A Link to the Past — next, so I installed that in my emulator as well, also with a graphics mod. I tested both and they work. We’ll see which I end up wanting to play more next, I guess. I really enjoyed going back to Ocarina of Time — it was also nice that it didn’t take me like a month to beat, which is because it’s an older game — and making my way through that, so Majora’s Mask is a natural next step as a sequel to that incorporating many of the same assets and elements. A Link Between Worlds is a little less severe and take-itself-s0-serious, and that would be refreshing as well, both after Ocarina and to lighten the mood generally.

That’s the update.

Monday I’ve got a Sorewound premiere and a bunch of news to catch up on. I hope to review Papir next week, and if I could do Dead Hits on top of that, so much the better, but I never know how it’s going to go these days until I get there and see, so basically I need to wait for that, whatever my ambitions might be.

Gonna go run some errands with The Patient Mrs. in a few ahead of a weekend that promises no real relief from the stress of the days before it and will surely leave me punchdrunk heading into the holiday next week. Speaking of, I probably won’t post much Wednesday, Thursday or Friday as we’ll have family in town and my time will be limited, but I’ll do my best as always.

If you celebrate or don’t, I appreciate you reading. Thank you for your time, your patience with my run-on sentences, for having an open mind for music. All of it. Thank you.

Enjoy the weekend, hydrate, and I’m back Monday. Fuck fascism. Free Palestine.

FRM.

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They’re almost there. It’s close. The 1991 debut album, Wretch, from desert rock pioneers Kyuss, isn’t nearly so realized as the three long-players they’d answer it with during their tenure from about 1989-1997, but as with the prior demo, 1990’s Sons of Kyuss (discussed here) — released as a self-titled since that’s what the band called themselves before shortening the moniker to Kyuss — there are hints of who this band was about to become. That would seem to be all the more the case as bassist Nick Oliveri came aboard sometime between Sons of Kyuss and the recording for Wretch, taking the place of Chris Cockrell, who still plays on “Black Widow” and “Deadly Kiss” here as they were held over from the demo’s session.

At least I’m pretty sure they were. It was 35 years ago in the lost annals of desert rock narrative and frankly I’ve never been that good at research, so if I’m wrong, it won’t be the last time. The band themselves — vocalist John Garcia, guitarist Josh Homme, Brant Bjork on drums and the aforementioned Oliveri on bass — are credited as producers for Wretch, alongside the returning Catherine Enny and Ron Krown, and recording engineer J.B. Lawrence, Chris Fuhrman, who mixed, and Carol Hibbs, who mastered, and with a fuller sound resulting from a kitchen that could apparently accommodate many cooks, Kyuss are that much closer to the blossoming their second album would represent for the forward steps that Wretch takes coming off the demo. That is to say, their sound isn’t all the way locked in yet, but it’s close.

In the brawny rush of “(Beginning of What’s About to Happen) Hwy 74” and the hooky “Love Has Passed Me By” and “Son of a Bitch” that follow, Kyuss lay out a template for who they were about to be. It’s not as raw or as aggressive as they were on Sons of Kyuss, but what they get in trade for teenaged-sounding punker thrust is a meatier groove. The turn into the chorus of “Love Has Passed Me By” and they way they align around the chug emerging therefrom is characteristic of what would desert rock would become largely in Kyuss‘ wake, a blink-and-it’s-gone heavy twist that would be flourish if it didn’t do so much to smooth out otherwise stark transitions. Wretch isn’t always so fluid, as even at 2:44, the repurposed “Black Widow” seems to be unsure where it’s heading — a contrast to the subsequent “Katzenjammer,” which is sure of itself to a point of genre-creation.

But if “Black Widow” is a more awkward fit, the same doesn’t necessarily apply to “Deadly Kiss” or “Isolation,” which comes out of “Isolation Desolation” from the demo. “Deadly Kiss” is rawer, but well placed ahead of “The Law,” which is the longest inclusion at nearly eight minutes and the most complex songwriting at work across Wretch. There’s a lot to hear in “The Law” in terms of atmosphere, despite the fact that it’s still pretty barebones production-wise, and in the character of the guitar and bass tones finding a kind of largesse distinct from the heavy metal and underground rock of the day, Kyuss are coming into their own in this material and defining the course they’d follow over the next half-decade plus.

That in itself makes Wretch a pivotal moment for a pivotal band. It’s a landmark because it exists, in other words. But it’s not the source of their influence, and by and large, when people talk about Kyuss having had an impact on the shape of heavy rock and roll — the songwriting of Bjork and Homme continues to resonate in acts from, let’s say, six out of the seven continents — they’re probably not talking about the 11 songs/48 minutes of Wretch.

But part of what this record tells listeners these decades after the fact is about how Kyuss got to where they got. They were not immediate, out of the gate, innovating heavy for a new generation. Separate in sound and geography from the soon-to-explode grunge, they were similarly deeply rooted in the place they came from and the experiential aspects of growing up in a landscape, the Ronald Reagan neocon hell of the 1980s and all suitable disaffection resulting. As it gets past “The Law” and what feels like a clean-sweep of the palette in “Isolation,” Wretch shifts into a movement of its three final songs, “I’m Not,” “Big Bikes” and “Stage III,” which grow progressively looser one into the next.

I suppose you could include “Isolation” in that movement too, regrounding as it does after “The Law,” but the succession of Wretch‘s last three tracks feels like a narrative unto itself of getting stoned and wandering musically. “Stage III” is as jammy as Kyuss get here, and including it gives key insight into how the rest of the songs were made. “Big Bikes,” grooves sleazier than “I’m Not” and feels like a send-up of biker-type masculinity that’s very early ’90s in its subversion — there was a time when men were allowed to do more than own bigboy trucks and be angry at phantoms; maybe you’re too young to remember — but is somewhat lumbering in its energy as compared to “Katzenjammer” or “Son of a Bitch” earlier on.

Those songs, more hammered-out and refined-feeling, do much to represent where Kyuss were at at this still-early stage in their tenure, but the real gift of the record is to be able to hear them figuring it out in real-time, as they go. They’d clearly learned from Sons of Kyuss and sound intent on pursuing the something they has discovered in that writing/recording process in this material. What they would end up discovering would of course be their own sound, and their next full-length, 1992’s Blues for the Red Sun, in uniting them with producer Chris Goss, helped set them on the path to becoming one of the most essential heavy rock acts of their generation, arguably desert rock’s most important band, and the root of a family tree that continues to grow as new are born out of old ones. Wretch isn’t where that happened, but it remains a crucial step on the way there.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

Yeah, don’t tell anybody but I guess I’m doing a series of Kyuss closeouts. I’ve been doing Friday Full-Lengths since like 2013, so it’s probably about time if I’m ever going to do it.

These weeks are a lot. This week was a lot. The days just kind of run together with things into things into things. This week The Pecan had five full school days, so that was something, but I was pretty busy regardless, between Hungarian class, running her back and forth, and whatever other errands etc. for the house. Even today we’re running around. The Patient Mrs. and I are at Wegmans right now. We went to Costco after dropoff. In a little bit, we need to get cash from an ATM for the woman at our house doing a pre-Thanksgiving pro-shop clean, and then I need to take lunch to school, then home, rest a bit, pickup, Girl Scouts, and into the evening whatever that may bring. Weekends these days don’t offer much respite or rest. Nem tud pihenni, you might say in magyarul.

Zelda update? Zelda update: I beat Twilight Princess. Did I tell you that? I really liked it. The graphics mod I used got rid of a lot of the bloom effect on the visuals — the vanilla game looks like it’s been smudged; the one I played is clearer-looking, which I liked — and the gameplay felt similar to Wind Waker without being too repetitive. It was very Ocarina of Time, if you want to keep it to in-franchise comparisons, so after beating it, I started a game of Ocarina of Time 3D on an emulator, also with a graphics mod. I’ve been having a blast with it. I played the original in high school in 1998. I remember being stoned in my mom’s basement on the N64 — if I say “those were the days,” understand I’m half-joking — and it being the first game I ever played (timed) for 100 hours. Final Fantasy VII hadn’t taken me that long, and I think I’m not sure if Final Fantasy VIII had come out yet, so yeah. I loved it then and I’m loving it now on the 3DS version (I have a use-a-traditional-controller mod and can do some of the extra buttons with my trackpad; it’s not perfect but it works). The game is just a masterpiece. And after Tears of the Kingdom, Breath of the Wild, Twilight Princess, The Wind Waker and even a bit of Skyward Sword (speaking of awful controls), that Ocarina of Time is a little smaller in scale is kind of refreshing. I’ve been playing for a week, had to start over once because I softlocked the game accidentally in Dodongo’s Cavern, and just last night pulled the Master Sword and got to be Adult Link for the first time. I made this picture my laptop background.

Next week is a Quarterly Review. Don’t expect much else beyond those five posts with 10 releases each. There’s always one or two news stories I don’t want to let slip, but as of right now I don’t have anything else slated. Just gonna dig in and keep my head down until it’s done.

I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Don’t let the world drag you down, which is easier said than done, I know. I hope you’ve got some comfort and warmth and you can focus on that instead of the persistent horrors. Hydrate and rest up as best you can. Monday we’re back for more kicking against the pricks.

Thanks again for reading. FRM.

FRM.

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