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Review & Track Premiere: Weeed, Do You Fall?

Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on August 11th, 2021 by JJ Koczan

WEEED Do You Fall

[Click play above to stream the premiere of Weeed’s ‘Sun Song’ from Do You Fall? LP. Album is available now to order on LP, CD and tape through Halfshell Records and Six Tonnes de Chair Records.]

Oregonian riffers, jammers and all around weirdos Weeed make a departure with their seventh full-length, Do You Fall?, but that’s pretty consistent. Everything they do is a departure. Mostly for the listener in terms of the Portland five-piece taking you from the place you are to the place they want you to be. They’ve done this through an array of heavy styles over the course of the last however long, relying on an unflinchingly organic underpinning since their days of blowout noise adventures like “Stoned in the Dungeon” from 2013’s Garden of Weeeden debut long-player (recorded in 2008), and transposing that over increasingly progressive and spacious fare on recent outings like 2018’s four-songer This, which could stand a CD reissue, and 2019’s You Are the Sky (review here), while still keeping an experimentalist, sometimes playful edge.

Do You Fall? builds on some of the impulses shown within You Are the Sky in suitably natural fashion. Enough to make one wonder if the sky is falling. And it’s worth noting that Dylan White, who engineered Do You Fall? and mixed alongside the band (Mikey Young mastered), also worked on You Are the Sky. The context, however, has shifted from one release to the next, and though songs like “Anicha” or the later march-groover “Sun Song” have their howls and stretches of heft, which is not to mention the divergence that the 10-minute “Reflection” makes into wailing electrified drone guitar before its final moment brings the band around to repetitions of “We shall reflect…” before they finally reveal “…the creative energy of the sun” in the last line and subsequently move into “Sun Song.”

This record — laced with vocal harmonies from guitarists Gabriel Seaver (acoustic and electric, also lyrics and the percussive qraqeb) and Mitch Fosnaugh (electric, also flute, slide guitar) — is like that all over, the nine tracks flowing and tying together in subtle ways throughout a wholly immersive 48-minute span, that wakes up in jazz-haphazard fashion on “Ontological Register” with the drums of John Goodhue and Evan Franz (both also tambourine, the latter also cover art) more acting out along with the hear-the-pick-on-the-string guitar strums than keeping time before the either looped or looped sounding acoustic foundation of ‘Moment to Moment” takes hold and reveals the hypnosis that is central to Weeed‘s mission here.

The key lines arrive in the 13-minute, multi-movement “Rhythm on the Ground,” teased also at the very end of “Moment to Moment”: “Give your body to the trance/Give your mind up to the dance.”

That is the ethic by which Do You Fall?, and the band — rounded out here by Ian Hartley, who adds clave, congas, shaker and cabasa for further percussion presence — abide, and from the way the waves pick up in “Moment to Moment” and the guitar enters over them, it’s abundantly clear that Weeed are working internally as well as externally. That is, it’s the trance they’re seeking as well as conveying to their audience. Vocals are gentle but richly melodic throughout the album’s entirety, but the pieces that comprise the whole aren’t necessarily reliant on voice to carry their message — though the lyrics do offer clarity as noted with “Rhythm on the Ground” above.

weeed

That song follows “Moment to Moment” and is a purposeful landmark complemented later by “Reflection,” these two extended tracks pushing deeper into the immersion so intentional on the part of the band. Percussion fades in at the outset of “Rhythm on the Ground,” a brief introduction that gives way to acoustic guitar, a verse, echoing flute, double-drums, a pilgrimage march, winding jam, electric solo increasing in energy, a build, a cut back to quiet, “Give your body to the trance/Give your mind up to the dance,” a gradual resurgence, percussion in and out again, a mantra-esque urging to “dissolve,” cymbal washes to do that, and an end on “Give your mind up…” before “Anicha” arrives to keep the momentum rolling.

It’s an outright gorgeous procession, and shorter pieces like “Anicha,” the duly-barefoot-sounding acoustic instrumental “Something About Having Your Feet in the River” (listed with all-lowercase stylization on the actual album), “Sun Song” and “Path to Dhamma Kuñja” — the latter named for a meditation center in Onalaska, Washington — offer various residualities to it, as well as to “Reflection,” which comes together around a more prog rock vibe in general, but showcases no less breadth for that. Likewise, “Something About Having Your Feet in the River” seems to answer “Ontological Register” in purpose — maybe opening side B, I don’t know — and the Eastern-tinged inflection of electric guitar in “Path to Dhamma Kuñja” seems to resolve the repetitions of “Anicha” even as it expands on them and heads toward the concluding reprise of “Rhythm on the Ground Pt. 3,” which brings back those essential lines that Weeed seem to have kept at their core all the while.

“Part 3,” it should be said, is not actually the end of “Rhythm on the Ground,” but a selected three-minute snippet of it that lets Do You Fall? conclude at a moment of strumming guitar and flute that feels like it could just as easily take flight as cut to silence in the way it does. This too is an example of the band’s effective world-building here, the manner in which everything they present unfolds not quite as a single song or a single idea, but as an entirety, given a direction but loose in that to find its own way there. Psychedelia, freak folk, acid prog neo-Zendik this or that, whatever stylistic tags one might want to foist on it, Do You Fall? exists within and without these things, finding a wavelength in its own cosmos and residing there peacefully but not at all still. Is the sky falling? Probably, yeah. Do you fall? Sometimes. But maybe for a few minutes that can be alright too. It can all be part of it. Ether and sunshine. It doesn’t have to make sense just to be, right? That’d be okay, right? Just for a few minutes?

Weeed, Do You Fall? (2021)

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