Ed Mundell, Rick Ferrante and Collyn McCoy were The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic. Maybe they still are. Maybe time is a construct and it’s all make believe and we’re holograms in someone’s cool-graphics-but-terrible-plot video game. It’s hard to pretend to know anything when you’re listening to their 2013 self-titled debut (review here). In any case, it was a genuine shock when in 2010 guitarist Ed Mundell quit Monster Magnet after playing in the band for 17 years and proving so essential to their greatest commercial successes and some of their hardest rocking fare; lest we forget he was also the original guitarist for The Atomic Bitchwax, but he’d already split from them for years by the time the aughts ended.

Mundell‘s last record with Monster Magnet was 2010’s Mastermind (review here), which sounded huge in a way that was exciting but still divides fans as regards the songs beneath all the voluminous swell. It was probably the band’s final play toward rock radio, and fairly enough timed for that since commercial rock radio didn’t exist for much longer afterward as much as it did even then. In even the ungainliness of their moniker, The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic was a willful left turn from where Mundell left Magnet. Completely instrumental save for some voice sampling on “Unassigned Agent X-27,” the trio’s nine-song/55-minute self-titled debut wove together extended jams like “The Third Eye” and the concluding “In the Atmosphere Factory” — the latter worthy of a samurai duel with Earthless as regards overall Hendrixian shred — with straight up plotted rockers like opener “Rockets Aren’t Cheap Enough,” “7000 Years Through Time,” “Exploration Team” and “Hello to Oblivion,” manic in that particular Bitchwaxian style but air-tight in their delivery, as well as languid psychedelia in “Get Off My World!,” the aforementioned “Unassigned Agent X-27” and the sitar-laced “The Man With a Thousand Names,” the latter reaches of “The Third Eye” and so on.

Nine years later, The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic‘s self-titled still feels like a significant pivot, on the scale, say, of Mundell moving from New Jersey to Los Angeles, which he’d also done. It is a guitar-forward record no matter the sound of a particular track, and in some of its speedier moments can feel overwhelming in its sweep, but that pretty clearly was the idea. Fortunately, Mundell had a rhythm section more than ready to keep up with the twists and turns. Collyn McCoy had been in Trash Titan and a few other projects by then but was already known as an ace bassist, and as the drummer of Sasquatch, Rick Ferrante added enough ‘super’ to the group to coincide with the charge of the material itself. The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic — which the band would eventually shorted to The UEMG, at least informally — was headspinning, but never out of control. They simply came out of the gate and threw down a gauntlet for anyone who dared to pick up. Not inaccessible, neither was it easy listening, and the more one paid attention to what was happening at any particular time — looking at you, “In the Atmosphere Factory” — the more one seemed to be swallowed up by it.

Most of all, it bleeds freedom and the joy of heavy rock guitar itself. I was fortunate enough to interview Mundell at the time and here’s (part of) what he had to say about the songwriting mindset:

“…Well, you know, we’re not trying to get a hit single. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a ‘hit single’ unless you’re Rihanna or whatever. We don’t care if we get on the radio. If it sounds cool and we all like it, then it works. We don’t have a label. (Laughs) We don’t have anything, and we all have been playing forever, so it’s like, ‘Play whatever you want.’ We can do whatever we want. We’re limited by our imagination here, because we don’t have to please anybody but ourselves. …There’s a couple 11-minute songs. ‘Rockets Aren’t Cheap Enough’ is a little over five, and that was pretty much, ‘Alright, let’s try and do a Captain Beyond kind of thing,’ so that was cool. Basically, we don’t have to write a two-minute-and-50-second single or anything, so we can do whatever sounds cool. Rick wanted to do backward cymbals on ‘Unassigned Agent X-27,’ and I was like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s do it! Let’s put a flanger on some backwards cymbals and throw them in there.’ There’s tons of backwards guitars, because I can do whatever I want, and I love the sound of backwards guitars. I love the sound of feedback, and I love the sound of eBows and echoplexes. So it’s like, ‘Alright, let’s go crazy.'”

That last sentiment, the “Alright let’s go crazy,” is about as concise a summary of The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic as one could hope for. Skilled players enjoying the process of letting go and seeing what happens. There’s a sense of adventure in The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic that, while reactionary to what Mundell was doing prior, for sure, still resonates from the record these nine years later. The band offered a follow-up EP, Through the Dark Matter (review here), in 2014, flirted with adding vocals the next year, and were announced for Magnetic Eye Records‘ Pink Floyd tribute in 2017, but did not actually feature on the final release. They’ve done shows periodically, but have seemed to be largely on the backburner as Ferrante has gone on one of heavy rock’s most enviable tears in Sasquatch and McCoy has delved righteously into chasing experimentalist dragons in Circle of Sighs, Night City, and various other incarnations, recently founding Suspirium in L.A. as an arts and performance space.

As for The UEMG, I’d never say never as long as everyone’s still alive, but instead I’ll note that if it was going to be their only full-length, I’m glad this record is packed as tight as it is. Take what you can get when you can get it, and all that. And if you’re ever in search of a record driven by the passion of its own creation, The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic stands ready to serve as an example.

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

—

Thank you to everybody for the kind responses to the Best of 2022 post. It means a lot to me that even where there’s disagreement, that’s expressed in a spirit of friendship and shared enjoyment of the art in question. No one has called me an idiot yet for liking what I liked this year, and I count that as a big win. Again, thank you.

The week otherwise has been wretched. I’ve been sick and my kid has been sick, home from school all week. He has a half-day today and we might send him? It’s been terrible. He doesn’t get sick often and there’s been fights to take medicine and fights to get him to eat food and drink water and everything else. He’s sitting next to me right now, phlegm-hacking away and still miserable. He woke up at 2:30AM and came into our bedroom, a half-hour battle ensued to get him to take kids NyQuil and go back to bed that finally ended when he was allowed to have TWO Rolos after he drank the 15ml down. First thing he did downstairs today was sneeze out a giant ball of snot onto his face. It sucks how much that feels like progress.

I seriously doubt he’ll be better by then given the glacial pace of his recovery thus far, and my own a couple days ahead on the same track — this might just be an all-winter cough — but we’ll almost definitely still pack into the car on Sunday morning and go do Xmas with The Patient Mrs.’ family in Connecticut, Xmas Eve with my family up the road for however long we last. We’ve been especially broke the last few weeks and the mood in the house is tense, grim and generally shitty. I feel like garbage, at least, physically, as a person and as a parent and husband. The Patient Mrs. gets paid this morning and I’ll go buy some Xmas presents and whatnot, but as regards “doing it up,” I don’t think this is really our year. We’ll catch the next one, and The Pecan will get enough presents between us and the rest of the family to keep him occupied for 10-15 minutes, so I’m sure it’ll be fine.

If you’re celebrating this weekend, have fun and be safe. My original plan was to do start the Quarterly Review next week, but no, that’s not happening. I’ll do it in January, split it up if necessary. I need to look at the calendar when I have five conscious minutes, which will hopefully happen sooner or later. I wish you and yours all the best in the meantime.

If nothing else, a great and safe weekend. Stay warm if it’s cold, cool if it’s hot, and watch your head any way you go. Don’t forget to hydrate. So important.

FRM.

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After posting some rehearsal-room pictures over the last couple weeks, Los Angeles-based The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic have made the official announcement that Brigitte Roka has joined the band as their full-time vocalist. Formerly the trio of bassist Collyn McCoy (also Sugarfly), drummer Rick Ferrante (also Sasquatch) and guitarist Ed Mundell (ex-Monster Magnet/The Atomic Bitchwax), The UEMG — as they’re mercifully abbreviated — released their Through the Dark Matter EP (review here) as the follow-up to their 2013 self-titled debut (review here), and while McCoy stepped to the mic on a cover of Willie Dixon‘s “Spoonful” on that shorter release, Roka marks the first standalone singer the band has had.

They have a couple shows coming up for the summer — I know I wouldn’t mind seeing them with Sun and Sail Club and The Freeks — and I’d expect some video or live audio to surface to give a sense of how their sound will have shifted with Roka on vocals, whether their space/acid rocking jams will solidify or stay as molten as they were on the self-titled, but as Mundell states in the announcement below, it won’t be until later this year that they hit the studio as a four-piece. It’s already on my most-anticipated-for-2016 list.

Word came in as follows:

The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic welcomes vocalist Brigitte Roka to the fold

Instrumental power trio The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic is instrumental (and a power trio) no more.

After releasing a full length CD in 2013, an EP in 2014 and performing the main stages of both DesertFests London and Berlin sans vocals, UEMG – comprised of Ed Mundell on guitar (Monster Magnet, the Atomic Bitchwax), Rick Ferrante on drums (Sasquatch) and Collyn McCoy on bass (Trash Titan, Sugar Fly) — has decided to change it up in 2015 with the addition of a permanent vocalist: Brigitte Roka of Los Angeles.

“My intention when leaving Monster Magnet after eighteen years was to work with new musicians, singers, producers and engineers,” says guitarist Ed Mundell. “In this quest, we have found an incredible singer in 19-year-old Brigitte Roka. She brings a fresh yet bluesy 70’s vibe to our sound. We are playing a few shows in Southern California debuting a few of our new songs and plan to go into the studio later in the year.”

The year is 1969,” enthuses bassist Collyn McCoy. “Robert Plant and Janis Joplin have a one-off fling backstage at the Texas International Pop Festival, producing a love child. Only the embryo is frozen and thawed out 27 years later, in Moscow, Russia of all places. Said embryo immigrates to Los Angeles where she’s raised on a steady diet of Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Atomic Rooster and of course, the musical stylings of her biological parents. That’s Brigitte. I mean, perhaps I’ve mythologized her origin story a bit, but really it’s the only plausible explanation for how awesome she is.”

Upcoming shows:
June 20th, 2015 – Yucca Man Shakedown, Yucca Valley, CA (private event)
August 29th, 2015 – Alex’s Bar, Long Beach, CA (with Sun and Sail Club and The Freeks)

https://www.facebook.com/TheUEMG
https://twitter.com/EDMUNDELL
https://theuemg.bandcamp.com
http://www.theultraelectricmegagalactic.com/

The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic, Through the Dark Matter (2014)

Some combinations in life, you just can’t go wrong. Ed Mundell and a wah pedal, for example. This proved to be the case last year when Mundell‘s jammy trio with bassist Collyn McCoy (Trash Titan) and Rick Ferrante (Sasquatch), the cumbersomely-named The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic, made their self-titled debut (review here), as it proved to be the case so many times over the guitarist’s years holding down leads in Monster Magnet and The Atomic Bitchwax. Well, further affirmation is welcome by me, and Mundell, McCoy and Ferrante seem only too pleased to provide it on the new tape EP, Through the Dark Matter.

A front-and-back j-card with blacklight-sensitive art from Brad Moore meant to invoke Miles Davis is included with the bright-orange cassette, which is pressed through Orbit Unlimited Records in a numbered (the numbers are also blacklight sensitive) edition of 200 copies. CDs were made available for the power trio’s recent European tour alongside Sasquatch, but 500 of those were made, so the tapes are somewhat harder to come by. Understandably, since the recording job by Snail‘s Matt Lynch at Mysterious Mammal Studios does so well in capturing the live dynamic between The UEMG‘s members, whether it’s Ferrante and McCoy stomping out on side 2’s “Day of the Comet” or Mundell setting an initial mood with minimal effects ambience on the introductory “Small Magellanic Cloud.”

Like the self-titled, Through the Dark Matter is clearly instrumental in its focus, but The UEMG do introduce some vocals for the first time to their studio work, McCoy stepping in for a suitably bluesy delivery on the Willie Dixon cover “Spoonful,” which is the centerpiece of the CD/digital version but closes side 1 of the tape following the intro and the jammed-out title-track. The effect its placement has is to ground the tape somewhat — these cats can jam, and when they do, they go pretty far out — a hook and start-stop funk-wah lead line reminding me no less of Clutch now than when I first streamed “Spoonful” and “Through the Dark Matter” here in April, and the relatively straightforward, traditional structure sits well between “Through the Dark Matter”‘s cosmic pulsations, the bass-heavy push of “Day of the Comet” and the space-jazz blissout of “Large Magellanic Cloud,” which closes out side 2, guitars, bass and drums all seeming to intertwine even as they stretch out in their own directions.

While it’s a relatively short 26 minutes — you wouldn’t call Through the Dark Matter a full-length, though it flows well — The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic‘s EP is all the more worth digging into for how natural it sounds coming from the band. Lynch is an experienced engineer and gets a clear, professional sound here that plays well with the Rhodes McCoy adds or the layers in Mundell‘s guitar, but the overall vibe is that The UEMG could more or less show up somewhere, plug in and make this happen. Maybe that’s a testament to the experience of the players involved or the several years they’ve already been jamming together, but whatever it is, a short release that plays out with such substance is an accomplishment that makes Through the Dark Matter a worthy follow-up to the debut. Wherever their voyage next takes them, I doubt it’s going to be much of a challenge to follow.

The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic, Through the Dark Matter EP (2014)

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The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic on Bandcamp

As lead guitarist in Monster Magnet from 1993-2010, Ed Mundell contributed to some of the most essential American heavy psych and heavy rock put to tape. Exploratory albums like Superjudge and Dopes to Infinity led to the more straightforward and commercial Powertrip and God Says No, and while the band settled into that aesthetic, Mundell continued to show his affiliation with heavy psych and traditional classic rock ethics in The Atomic Bitchwax, a project he left after releasing two full-lengths and an EP upon relocating to California circa 2004. His tenure would continue for more than half a decade with Monster Magnet and the Bitchwax continued on and have thrived against the expectations of many in his absence, but Mundell began to explore a range of psychedelic jams in the years subsequent, beginning with a track contribution by an instrumental trio called The Formula to the High Volume compilation put out by High Times magazine in ’04. Gradually, this jammy impulse led to the formation of The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic, and toward the end of the last decade, the band began playing out here and there on the West Coast, low key. Shows were jams, basically, with Mundell joined by bassist Collyn McCoy (Trash Titan) and drummer Rick Ferrante (Sasquatch), but sooner or later an album was bound to happen, and when it finally did, Snail’s Matt Lynch stepped in to record at his Mysterious Mammal Studios.

The resulting self-titled full-length (released through the band’s own Orbit Unlimited imprint) is probably too layered with psychedelic effects, backwards guitar, Echoplex, and leads to completely represent The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic’s live show, but at the root of each of the album’s nine tracks is an organic sounding jam that’s simply been built upon. Commonalities exist on songs like “Hello to Oblivion” to early The Atomic Bitchwax, and perhaps that’s to McCoy and Ferrante’s credit as a versatile rhythm section as much as it is to Mundell, who leads with no shortage of twists and turns in his intricate riffing. They are, true to form, a powerful trio, and the album – instrumental but for an intro spoken by the writer Harlan Ellison that appears reprinted on the inside of the gatefold digi-liner – essentially works as a showcase for their chemistry, playing out with immersive, driving psychedelia over the course of just under 55 minutes. Sasquatch guitarist Keith Gibbs appears on second track “Exploration Team,” donating a solo in complement to Mundell, and flourishes of sitar and extra percussion appear on the Eastern-keyed “The Man with a Thousand Names,” but for a good portion of the album, it’s McCoy, Mundell and Ferrante on their own in outer-headspace, the backwards guitar and warm bass tone of intro cut “Unassigned Agent X-27” providing lead-in for “Exploration Team”’s winding riffs and immediately engaging fuzz. As with most of the material on the album, riffs feel plotted out beforehand – that is, for how well McCoy plays off Mundell’s guitar with bass fills, I don’t think he’s hearing this stuff for the first time as though it were made up on the spot in the studio – and changes are positioned well, guitars emerging, receding, making way for the bass and then coming forward again, but the underlying core is organic and working on a time-tested ethic of players in a room playing. Everything else is added around that central idea.

While that goes to deepen the actual listening experience, The UEMG’s Hendrixian jam-ready modus probably would’ve come through no matter what they put on top. Even as he takes an extended, soulful solo in “Get off My World!,” Mundell seems to leave room for the groove Ferrante and McCoy ride, and the result is one of the self-titled’s more engaging moments of laid back heavy psychedelia, produced crisply but not overly clean, and a distinguishing factor between The UEMG and Mundell’s work in his past outfits, the real character of the band emerging even as the track fades into “7000 Years through Time,” and the signature style of winding riffs is revived. Structured into two vinyl sides with cuts both just over 11:40 ending each one, The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic is well symmetrical as an album, whatever spontaneous characteristics it might present, and the band works ably within that sphere. Perhaps after so many years in Magnet, Mundell couldn’t help but give this record a sense of structure, even as comparably off the rails as it might seem on the surface with the difference of approach. Either way, it’s a stronger, richer listen for it, and with “7000 Years through Time” running into the extended “The Third Eye” to end the first half, their cosmic flow is well underway, only moving farther out into the far out with the longer jam, which starts out barn-burner fast, but eases into a slower groove toward the middle to rock a build near the end with some of McCoy’s best basslines of the album, holding the song together in its stillest moments and driving it forward toward the end at its most raucous.

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