Posted in Whathaveyou on January 24th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Look at the blue text below and you know what you’re gonna see? Yes, a whole lot of skull emojis. Like a lot. But it happens that each individual one corresponds to a demonstration of the labor of love and community that is the Maryland Doom Festival. From Abel Blood through Zekiah, Maryland Doom Fest 2024 celebrates its 10th anniversary edition with its standard sans-bullshit glut of heavy. Once more the Frederick-based event looks your square in the eye, drops for absolutely immersive days on you and asks if you’re up for it. Well, are ya?
I’m not sure what my summer travel plans are yet — this and Freak Valley have overlapped the last couple years for me — but it’s been since 2019 that I was last down there and oh I’d be so eager to show up and have the three or four people who recognize me (and thus make it feel like an absolute family experience; love love love everywhere you go down there) quietly think to themselves I’ve gotten older and fatter en route to obliterating myself with volume for about 96 hours straight. Fuck. King. A.
Oh, and I hear Thunderbird Divine have new stuff in the works and it’s amazing. So that’s a thing too.
Social media had it like this:
We are super stoked to share with you the Maryland Doom Fest 2024 rosters, schedules, and lineups!!!
#4daysofdoom
THE MARYLAND DOOM FEST 2024
✝️Thursday June 20
Cafe 611-
💀 Thunderhorse 1115-1230 💀 The Magpie 1010-1055 💀 Born of Plagues 905-950 💀 Stone Nomads 800-845 💀 Pyre Fyre 700-740 💀 Dirt Eater 600-640
Olde Mother Brewery-
💀 Spellbook 920-1000 💀 Strange Highways 820-900 💀 Bailjack 720-800 💀 Stone Brew 620-700 💀 Abel Blood 520-600
💀 Ten Ton Slug 915-1000 💀 Thousand Vision Mist 815-855 💀 Crowhunter 715-755 💀 Asthma Castle 615-655 💀 Bonded by Darkness 515-555
✝️Saturday June 22
Cafe 611-
💀 WHORES. 1150-115 💀 AGE/S 1040-1130 💀 Bloodshot 935-1020 💀 O ZORN! 830-915 💀 Double Planet 730-810 💀 Sun Years 630-710 💀 When the Deadbolt Breaks 530-610
Olde Mother Brewery-
💀 Black Water Rising 915-1000 💀 Switchblade Jesus 815-855 💀 Wyndrider 715-755 💀 Indus Valley Kings 615-655 💀 Vermillion Whiskey 515-555 💀 Doctor Smoke 415-455
✝️Sunday June 23
Cafe 611-
💀 Cirith Ungol 1200-110 💀 Mythosphere 1055-1140 💀 Conclave 955-1035 💀 Compression 855-935 💀 Sons of Arrakis 755-835 💀 Curse the Son 655-735 💀 Kulvera 555-635 💀 Old Blood 500-535 💀 Cloud Machine 405-440
Olde Mother Brewery-
💀 Thunderbird Divine 920-1000 💀 Black Manta 820-900 💀 High Noon Kahuna 720-800 💀 Unity Reggae 620-700 💀 King Bastard 520-600 💀 Zekiah 420-500
52 bands over a 4 day weekend at 2 venues across the street from one another!! #4daysofdoom
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 1st, 2023 by JJ Koczan
With headlining performances slated from a soon-to-retire Cirith Ungol, noise crushers Whores., mostly-local melodic heavy proggers Mythosphere, Switchblade Jesus, Conclave, Ten Ton Slug (from Ireland; I got to see them one time; way burly; they’ll do well in Frederick), and plenty of other returning acts and newcomers alike, the lineup for Maryland Doom Fest 2024 could hardly be more appropriate a celebration of the annual Chesapeake gathering’s 10th anniversary. Based in Frederick, the four-day ultra-consuming sensory assault of volume will once again take place at Cafe 611 and Olde Mother Brewing, and if you’ve never been, I’ll tell you outright there’s nothing quite like it.
I mean that. Maryland Doom Fest goes harder than the average festival. A day might start at 1PM and not end until 2AM. And now more than ever, as the fest has grown with the two venues running alongside each other, the bill is packed. I think this year was 50 bands? Well, they’ve got 52 for 2024, and while next June is a while out, there’s a tradition to uphold of Halloween announcements, and festival honcho JB Matson (Bloodshot, War Injun, Outside Truth, etc.) pays tribute to his regulars — Shadow Witch, Bailjack, Thunderbird Divine, Thousand Vision Mist (congratulations to Danny Kenyon of Thousand Vision Mist on recently kicking cancer’s ass), among others here — while also giving showcase to outfits like Pyre Fyre, O Zorn! (whose very moniker heralds weirdness), WyndRider and more.
Congrats to Matson and all at Maryland Doom Fest on their 10th anniversary. To do something of this scope once is a lot. To do it across 10 years, well, aside from being fucking crazy, it’s also deeply admirable.
The aforementioned announcement — brief as ever; the poster lands heavy enough to cover any lack of verbiage — follows, courtesy of socials. Ticket link is there too:
WE ARE EXTREMELY PLEASED TO PRESENT TO YOU, THE MARYLAND DOOM FEST 2024 LINEUP!!!!! THIS WILL BE OUR 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION!! (#128128#)(#129304#)(#128128#)
52 bands over a 4 day weekend at 2 venues across the street from one another!! #4daysofdoom
Posted in Reviews on October 12th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
Well, the weekend’s over and it’s time to wrap up the Quarterly Review. Rest assured, I wrote the following during my copious weekend leisure time, resting on the side of a heated Olympic-size pool with a beverage nearby. It definitely wasn’t four in the morning on a Sunday or anything. If I haven’t gotten the point across yet, I hope you’ve found something amid this massive swath of records that has resonated with you. By way of a cheap plug, I’ll be featuring audio from a lot of these bands on the Gimme Metal show this Friday, 5PM Eastern, if you’re up for tuning in.
Either way, thanks for reading and for being a part of the whole thing. Let’s wrap it up.
Quarterly Review #51-60:
The Pilgrim, …From the Earth to the Sky and Back
Lest he be accused of laziness, Gabriele Fiori — also of Black Rainbows, Killer Boogie and the head of the Heavy Psych Sounds label, booking agency and festival series — made his solo debut as The Pilgrim with Spring 2019’s Walking into the Forest (review here). Joined by Black Rainbows drummer Filippo Ragazzoni, Fiori ups the scale of the journey with the second The Pilgrim LP, …From the Earth to the Sky and Back. Richer in arrangement, bolder in craft and more confident in performance, the album runs 14 songs and 50 minutes still largely based around an acoustic acid rock foundation, but with a song like “Riding the Horse” tapping ’70s singer-songwriter vibes while “Cuba” touches on Latin percussion and guitar and “Space and Time” journeying out near the record’s end with waves of synthesizer, it seems The Pilgrim isn’t so willing to be pigeonholed. So much the better.
There is an undercurrent of extremity to the debut release from Polymoon, who hail from the psychedelic hotbed that is Tampere, Finland. The six-song/42-minute Caterpillars of Creation turns in opener “Silver Mt.” to fervent guitar push or from freaked-out cosmic prog into drifting post-universe exploration, setting the stage for the dynamic that unfolds throughout. The wash early in the second half of “Lazaward” is glorious, and it’s not the first or the last time Polymoon go to that adrenaline-pumping well, but the serenity that caps that song and seems to continue into “Malamalama” in closing side A is no less effective. “Helicaling” mounts tension in its early drumming but finally releases it later, and “Neitherworld” gives Caterpillars of Creation‘s most fervent thrust while closer “Metempsychosis” rounds out with a fitting sense of dissipation. As a first album/first release, it is particularly stunning, and to make it as plain as possible, I will think less of any list of 2020’s best debut albums that leaves out Polymoon.
The two-piece comprised of Martin Weaver (ex-Wicked Lady) and synthesist Scott “Dr. Space” Heller (Øresund Space Collective, Black Moon Circle, etc.) position First Treatment as their proper studio debut, and it certainly hits its marks in galaxial adventuring well enough to qualify as such, but the duo have been on a creative splurge throughout this year — even in lockdown — and so the six songs here are also born out of the work they’ve been doing since releasing their debut single “Ghouls ‘n’ Shit” (video premiere here) late last year. The album launches with “Journey to Enceladus,” which boasts drum programming by Weaver and though one of the movements in the 21-minute “Into the Oort Cloud” is based around beats, the bulk of First Treatment is purely a work of guitar and synth, and it basks in the freedom that being so untethered inherently brings. Running an hour long, it’s improvisational nature isn’t going to be for everyone, but Heller and Weaver make a strong argument that maybe it should be.
Who’s ready for a New Wave of PNW Fuckery? That’s right folks, the NWOPNWF has arrived and it’s Spokane, Washington’s Merlock leading the sometimes-awfully-punk-sometimes-awfully-metal-but-somehow-also-always-sludge charge. Aggressive and damning in lyrics, swapping between raw screams, grows, shouts and cleaner vocals and unhinged in terms of its genre loyalties, That Which Speaks seems to find the “melt faces” setting wherever it goes, and though there’s a sense of the four-piece feeling out what works best for them stylistically, the sometimes frantic, sometimes willfully awkward transitions — as in second cut “Prolapse” — serve the overall purpose of undercutting predictability. Eight-minute opener/longest track (immediate points) “Idolon” stomps and shoves and gnashes and nasties its way through, and that’s the modus across what follows, though the scream-along headbanger “Vessel” somehow seems even rawer, and though it ends by floating into oblivion, the start of “Condemnation” is heavy fuckin’ metal to me. You never know quite where Merlock are going to hit next, and that’s the joy of the thing. May they remain so cacophonous.
Long-running UK psychedelic rockers Sun Dial — led by founding guitarist/vocalist Gary Ramon — released Mind Control in 2012. Sulatron Records picked it up in 2015, and now, five years after that, the same label presents Mind Control: The Ultimate Edition, a 2CD version of the original LP-plus-bonus-tracks reissue that brings the total runtime of the release to a well-beyond-manageable 98 minutes of lysergic experimentation. A full 20 tracks are included in the comprehensive-feeling offering, and from early mixes to alternative takes and lost tracks, and if this isn’t the ‘ultimate’ version of Mind Control, I’m not sure what could be, notwithstanding a complete-studio-sessions box set. Perhaps as a step toward that, Mind Control: The Ultimate Edition gives an in-depth look at a vastly underappreciated outfit and is obviously put together as much for the label as by it. That is to say, you don’t put out a reissue like this unless you really love the original record, and if Sulatron loving a record isn’t enough endorsement for you, please turn in your mushrooms on your way out the door.
Immersion is the goal of Saturn’s Husk‘s third long-player, The Conduit, and the Riga, Latvia, instrumentalist trio accomplish it quickly with the fluid riffs that emerge from the drone-based intro “Death of Imaginary Lights” and the subsequent 10-minute opener “Black Nebula.” At nine songs and 63 minutes, the album is consuming through the welcome nodder “The Heavenly Ape,” the especially-doomed “The Ritual” and the more mellow-float centerpiece “Spectral Haze,” while “Mycelium Messiah” brings more straight-ahead fuzz (for a time) and drones on either side surround the 10:35 “Sand Barrows,” the latter serving as the finale “A Shattered Visage” quoting Percy Bysshe Shelley and the former “City of the Djinn” running just a minute-plus but still doing enough to reset the brain from where “Mycelium Messiah” left it. Almost functioning as two albums side-by-side with “Spectral Haze” as the dividing point, The Conduit indeed seems to join various sides together, with a depth to coincide that invites the listener to explore along with it.
Landing a punch of classic metal to go along with its heavy-bottomed groove, Diggeth‘s Gringos Galacticos — one supposes the title ‘Spacecrackers’ was taken — was released by the Dutch trio in 2019 and receives a US limited vinyl edition thanks to Qumran Records. One finds some similar guitar heroics to those of Astrosoniq‘s more straightforward moments, but Diggeth‘s focus remains on hookmaking for the duration, offering hints of twang and acoustics in “In the Wake of Giants” and tipping a hat southwestward in “Three Gringos,” but “Straight-Shooter” is willfully breaks out its inner Hetfield and even as the penultimate “Unshackled” departs for a quieter break, it makes its way back in time for the big finish chorus, adding just a touch of Candlemass grandiosity for good measure before the harmonica-laced closing title-track rounds out with its dynamic spacey weirdness, the name of the album repeating itself in an answer to the Stephen Hawking sample that started the voyage on its way.
Cursed Tongue Records has the vinyl here, and Three Moons the tape, and the CD will arrive through Aladeriva Records, La Rubia Producciones, Aneurisma Records, Surnia Records and Violence in the Veins — so yes, Horizon‘s third album, The White Planet Patrol is well backed. Fair enough for the Kyuss-via-Black–Rainbows vibes of “End of Utopia” or the initial charge and flow of “The Backyard” that sets the Alicante, Spain, trio on their way. “King Serpent” and “Death & Teddies” bring well-crafted fuzz to bear, and “Blind World” effectively layers vocals in its chorus to coincide, but the more laid back roll of the title-cut is an unmistakable highlight. Shades of mid-paced Nebula surface in “Meet the Forest” later on, but Horizon are part of a tradition of heavy bands in Alicante and they know it. The smoothness of their tone and delivery speaks volumes on its own in that regard, never mind the actual songwriting, which also leaves nothing to be desired.
Debut EP from Limousine Beach out of Pittsburgh, and if the three guitars involved don’t push it over the top, certainly the vocal harmonies get that particular job done. You got six minutes for three songs? Yeah, obviously. They scorch through “Tiny Hunter” to close out, but it’s in the leadoff title-track that Stealin’ Wine + 2 sees the Dave Wheeler-fronted outfit land its most outrageous chorus, just before they go on to find a middle-ground between KISS and Thin Lizzy on “Hear You Calling.” The harmonies open and are striking from the outset, but it’s in how they’re arranged around the standalone parts from Wheeler (also Outsideinside, ex-Carousel) that the outfit’s truest potential is shown. Issued through Tee Pee Records, Stealin’ Wine + 2 is the kind of thing you’d pick up at a show in a normal year and then feel way ahead of everyone else when the LP finally hits. Not a normal year, obviously, but Limousine Beach are serving due notice just the same. In six minutes, no less.
I’m sure a lot of records show up at Satan’s door with notes, like, “Dear sir, please find the enclosed submitted for your approval,” but it’s not hard to imagine Beelzebub himself getting down with the filth-coated sludge and rolling doom unfurled across The Crooked Whispers‘ debut offering, Satanic Melodies, marked by hateful, near-blackened screams from Anthony Gaglia and the plodding riffs of Chad Davis (Hour of 13, et al). The title-track is longest at 8:23 and in addition to featuring Ignacio De Tommaso‘s right-on bass tone in its midsection, it plays out early like Weedeater sold their collective soul, and drifts out where earlier pieces “Sacrifice” and “Evil Tribute” and “Profane Pleasure” held their roll for the duration. Stretches of clean-vocal cultistry add to the doomier aspects, but The Crooked Whispers seem to care way less about genre than they do about worshiping the devil, and that unshakable faith behind them, the rest seems to fall into place in accordingly biting fashion.
