Aug. 22 is the release date here, but we’re talking about a record that came out 25 years ago, so I’m not sure how precise we need to be. Further (discussed here), counterintuitive to its title, was the first Solace full-length, released in 2000 — a quarter of a century ago. The good news is I saw Solace in January (review here) and they still bring it.

The celebration around this anniversary — and if you know this record, I don’t need to tell you it indeed is a thing to be celebrated; they have the remaster of opener “Man Dog” up now; check the bottom of the post — is made bittersweet in the context of the passing this January of original Solace vocalist Jason. He was long-enough out of the band by the time they put out The Brink (review here) in 2019, but remains a pivotal part of their legacy. Further neatly encapsulates that.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say here. Maybe I’ll get to stream it. I don’t know. It’s cool that this is on Magnetic Eye, though, as it was label manager Jadd Shickler‘s past imprint — MeteorCity — that had the original release.

From the PR wire:

SOLACE – Further 25th Anniversary Reissue

Preorder: http://lnk.spkr.media/solace-further

Bandcamp: https://diedrunk.bandcamp.com/album/further-2025-remaster

25 years, a quarter of a century, is a very long time in the life of any human being. And maybe even more so, in the lifespan of a recording of music. Yet “Further” by American stoner metal band SOLACE, first released at the turn of the millennium, has stood the test of time. Its tracks feel just as contemporary and relevant as in the year 2000.

A 25th anniversary is a great occasion for an enhanced, extended, and re-mastered edition of a timeless classic, but this much-deserved reissue was already decided upon when original SOLACE singer Jason L. sadly passed away in January 2025. This turns the new edition of “Further” into an unplanned but due tribute to his legacy and everything that Jason brought to the band during his formative years as their tortured and brilliant frontman.

SOLACE are celebrated veterans of the American metal scene. Hailing from Asbury Park, New Jersey at the windswept shore of the Western Atlantic, the band was founded in 1996. Built on a solid foundation of classic metal, early doom and punk ethic, the original four-piece infused a healthy dose of hardcore fury into grooving, grinding sludge.

Three years after the success of “Further” on both sides of the Atlantic, SOLACE returned with the sophomore album “13” (2003) that witnessed the Americans expanding and solidifying their style by highlighting the epic side of their songwriting. In the wake of this album, the band was invited twice to perform at the prestigious Roadburn Festival in 2006 and 2009, which further endeared them to an international audience.

Following a string of singles and EPs, the shoremen returned with the acclaimed third album “A.D.” in 2010. Although this release was again well received, a hiatus followed during which SOLACE implemented changes in their line-up. This maneuver got the heavy ship afloat again, and the remarkable full-length number four, “The Brink”, made landfall in 2019. This album has been described as a glorious trek through churning riffage, weighty doom power and drunken sea shanties, while the massive use of NWOBHM dual-guitar attack was also gladly noted.

SOLACE call their amalgamation of doom and heavy metal with hardcore elements dirt metal, while elsewhere it has been somewhat tongue-in-cheekily dubbed shorecore. Others file the New Jersey five-piece under stoner metal – and in truth, all these descriptions fit to an extent.

Raise a glass to Jason’s legacy and enjoy his outstanding performance on SOLACE’s debut album “Further” that has been diligently and respectfully remastered to shine brighter than ever before!

Band: Solace
Album title: Further
Style: Stoner Metal
Re-release date: August 22, 2025
Label: Magnetic Eye Records

Tracklist
1. Man Dog (2025 Remaster)
2. Black Unholy Ground (2025 Remaster)
3. Followed (2025 Remaster)
4. Whistle Pig (2025 Remaster)
5. Hungry Mother (2025 Remaster)
6. Angels Dreaming (2025 Remaster)
7. Suspicious Tower (2025 Remaster)
8. Heavy Birth/2-Fisted (2025 Remaster)
9. Another Life
10. We Bite
11. On the Hunt
12. Heavy Birth/2-Fisted (Distanced from Reality version)
13. Dirt
14. Funk #49 (Live in Tokyo ’98)

Recording line-up
Jason – voice, lyrics
Tommy Southard – guitars
Bill “Bixby” Belford – drums
Rob Hultz – bass

Produced by Eric Rachel and Solace
Recorded by Eric Rachel at Trax East, South River, NJ (US)
Mixed by Eric Rachel at Trax East, South River NJ (US)
Mastering by Alan Douches at West Westside Music, Hudson Valley, NY (US)

Cover painting: “Midnight Mass 2” by Wes Benscoter
Original layout by Frank Bridges
2025 layout by Łukasz Jaszak

Shop
http://lnk.spkr.media/solace-further

Solace Current lineup
Justin Daniels – guitar
Justin Goins – keyboard, vocals
Tim Schoenleber – drums
Mike Sica – bass
Tommy Southard – guitar

https://solace-merch.printify.me/products
https://diedrunk.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/SolaceBand/

http://store.merhq.com
http://magneticeyerecords.com/
https://www.instagram.com/magneticeyerecords/
https://www.facebook.com/MagneticEyeRecords

Solace, Further (2025 Remaster) (2000)

Solace, The Brink (2019)

The riff-mad scourge of the Jersey Shore, Solace made their full-length debut in 2000 through MeteorCity with the somewhat counterintuitively titled Further. What was then the four-piece of guitarist Tommy Southard, bassist Rob Hultz (now of Trouble), drummer Bill “Bixby” Belford and the vocalist I only ever knew by his first name, Jason. Southard and Hultz had been in punk bands together before their heavier post-grunge outfit Godspeed — whose lineup also featured Chris Kosnik pre-The Atomic Bitchwax and current Solace drummer Tim Schoenleber — were snagged in a major label cull by Atlantic Records (see also: Core) following the emergence of Monster Magnet. In 1994, they released their lone LP, Ride, toured with Black Sabbath and Cathedral, and collaborated with Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden on the Nativity in Black tribute album. It was quite a time.

Solace was a different animal. And very definitely an animal. Further was preceded by the Jersey Devils EP (discussed here), which came out in 1999 through MeteorCity and Freebird Records as a split with fellow Garden Staters Solarized, as well as a demo tape (yes, a tape) and a two-songer 7″, but obviously its 53-plus minutes were the first deeper look at what they were about. Mostly volatility.

Were they punk? Hardcore? Metal? They could be righteously aggressive and noisy, roll on a riff for however long, or twist their way through polar shifts within the span of a song like “Black Unholy Ground” or charge through the scorching “Whistle Pig” before turning to acoustic-led melancholia on “Hungry Mother.” Further was likewise chaotic and dynamic, but it all somehow held together. Southard would prove to be the madman behind the madcap, but taken as a whole, Further feels untamed and willful, and when they hit it, the force of their delivery remains unto itself. I’m not going to pretend to be impartial about the band or this record, but after I don’t even want to guess how many times I’ve heard it, I’m still blindsided almost every time.

The seven-minutes-each “Mandog” and “Black Holy Ground” open, and “Followed,” which follows (ha.), tops eight, so by the time you’re three songs into it, it’s been about 25 minutes. And from the first punch of Hultz‘s bass as “Mandog” kicks in to the manic careening circa five minutes in, the shred and the way they seem to throw the song down the stairs as they enter the fade, it remains a signature piece. “Black Holy Ground” is tense in the drums and finds Jason brooding in the first verse, but malleable enough as a singer to carry that melody and move to a shoutier approach as the proceedings grow more intense. It all ends in a wash of noise, but before that, there’s that-era-Clutch-worthy nod and hardcore-punk forward thrust, and 24 years later you’re still kind of left wondering how it all holds together.

Because with some bands, it’s the bass or the drums keeping a central rhythm while the guitar goes off and does it’s thing. You hear that a lot. It’s the classic power trio modus. With Further, it’s not that Solace aren’t tight — if they weren’t, the album probably wouldn’t exist — but that it’s all-in on all-out. Everybody’s in on it. Maybe that applies to the vocals to a lesser extent, but even over the course of “Followed,” Jason ends up in a much different place than he began in topping the build first with subdued, low-mouth singing and barking out later for “Some semblance of self/Some semblance of love” before the cymbal wash leads into the finish. “Whistle Pig” and the later “Suspicious Tower” are shorter and more direct, but still dare the listener to keep up if they can, and on the other side of “Hungry Mother” awaits the tense plod of “Angels Dreaming,” which spends its first four minutes holding itself back tempo-wise before finally breaking free with what in a lot of contexts would be boogie but in Solace‘s hands becomes a sledge. And of course the solo nudges in on psychedelic territory before the big slowdown, because how could it not?

It’s not that Solace, even at this point, were ever lazy in songwriting or haphazard stylistically. Rest assured, they’ve always known precisely what they’re about; it’s who they are. And Further was cohesive — it’s not that Solace got pissed off, hit record and that was it. The record makes its own kind of sense, and its refusal to do otherwise or to compromise in persona or spirit is palpable, whether it’s “Hungry Mother” or “Suspicious Tower,” which starts with a sample from the 1962 sci-fi flick The Creation of the Humanoids, or the 11-minute “Heavy Birth/2-Fisted,” for which my brain still does a “holy shit here we go” every time it comes on. Aggro groove, a trippy middle with toms thudding away behind paid off by shred and a cacophonous but controlled assault to end its extended, sweeping course. I’m not sure how many other bands could even turn that into a song, let alone that one.

Tumult be thy name. Different editions of Further have bonus covers of Iron Maiden‘s “Another Life” and Misfits‘ “We Bite,” the latter of which feels like a better fit but both of which are thoroughly brought into Solace‘s own sound. And maybe that’s not such a surprise now, nearly a quarter-century after the fact with however many microgenres branched off from the core of heavy rock and roll, but the punk-metal Solace wrought on Further would remain a definitive presence in their subsequent work, whether it was 2003’s 13 (discussed here), the 2004 split with Greatdayforup that introduced Justin Daniels on yes-we-need-more guitar, or the fraught-in-the-making 2010 third album, A.D. (review here), after which they actually disbanded until coming back with a new lineup for the 2017 EP, Bird of Ill Omen (review here) and ensuing fourth full-length, The Brink (review here), which in all honesty I’ll tell you was something I didn’t imagine would ever actually happen until late-2019 when it did.

And what could be more Solace than that? The very definition of ‘you never know.’ Now fronted by Justin “Has a Surname” Goins, with Southard and Daniels on guitar, the aforementioned Schoenleber on drums and bassist Mike Sica, Solace are slated to play next year’s Planet Desert Rock Weekend in Las Vegas, and whether it’s there or some dive in Asbury — they were the kings of Long Branch’s The Brighton Bar, sadly closed — I would encourage you heartily to witness first-hand what they bring to the stage when the opportunity presents itself. Fury like no other.

As always, I hope you enjoy. The band have been putting songs up one at a time through their catalog on their YouTube, if you want to hit that up.

—

How ’bout that Quarterly Review, huh? It’s a doozy, and if you missed it the other however-many times I said so, it’s only halfway over. 50 more reviews will roll out next Monday to Friday, so sit tight. Plenty more to come.

Tonight is the variety show for The Pecan’s school. It’s at the high school auditorium, kind of a big deal to the kids, blah blah. She’s doing a stand-up routine of math jokes. Killed at dress rehearsal. Brave, all that. Fine. It’s at 6PM, which because I’m in my 40s feels like a decent time for a show to start.

The Zelda saga continues in our home. We borrowed my nephew’s old GameCube so we could play The Wind Walker this week. Between The Patient Mrs. and I, I’m pretty sure someone has gotten hit in Zelda-related incidents the last three days in a row, so you can see how that’s going. Last night I got hit — hard — for falling in lava in whatever early-game dungeon it was, and just kind of shut down for the night. The Patient Mrs., prone to taking it all on herself anyway, stepped in and got the grappling hook, but yeah. Broadly speaking, it sucked. We had a good first night with it on Sunday, but then, the new thing is always an easy day.

Parenting.

We’re also shit-broke, so that’s a fun additional layer of stress. Turns out the impending Budapest trip cost all the money forever. Yay.

Have a great and safe weekend. I’m gonna shower after dropoff, throw in a load of laundry and try to find some kind of breakfast that isn’t binge-eating cheese or almond/pecan butter. I’ll start setting up the next QR post for Monday and maybe do some listening, but the break is what I’m after, so the sooner I’m in it the better. Though the shower is imperative there as well.

Thanks for reading.

No merch up right now, but FRM anyway.

The Obelisk Collective on Facebook

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch

Dutch progressive heavy psychedelic rockers Monomyth‘s second full-length, Further, was released in 2014 through Suburban Records — maybe Suburban/Burning World? — as the follow-up to the Den Haag five-piece’s 2013 self-titled debut (review here). And it was and is true to its title. Comprised of four tracks running about 45 minutes long, the album’s expanse is matched only by its sense of control. While one might be misled by looking songs 10, 12 and 17 minutes long into thinking Monomyth were simply locking in space jams and improvising their way into the trance-inducing cosmic ether, that’s not really the case. “Ark-M,” which opens the proceedings with welcoming and warm tonality and an, underlying pulse that is just tense enough to keep things moving, runs 10:11 and is thoughtful and considered in its flow and progression.

Bassist/baritone guitarist Selwyn Slop, guitarists Tjerk Stoop and Thomas Van Den Reydt, keyboardist/guitarist Peter Van Der Meer and drummer Sander Evers (formerly of 35007, also Gomer Pyle) use keys to underscore rhythmic guitar in extended and melodic lines of organ that give the tension in the strings and drums a foundation on which to rest intermittently, and though the entirety of the album is instrumental, the motion Monomyth undertake, with its periodic bouts of louder distortion and moves into fluidity and quirky adventurism — again, this is just in the first 10 minutes of the record — is every bit emblematic of the goal they clearly laid out for themselves in calling Further what they did.

The intricacy of patterns well matched by the Maarten Donders cover art out front and captured with due grace in the recording by Jordi Langelaan (who also mixed with Van Der Meer, while Wim Bult mastered), Further moves easily into its lower-end-minded second cut “Spheres” with a sureness of purpose that can only be called Floydian. There’s a drama that unfolds between the bass and guitar — a conversation there — happening at about three minutes into the total 12:28, but the band soon return to the sense of drift that got them to where they are and use it as the beginning of a subtle and almost jazzy linear build that moves ahead not with tension headed toward an overblown crescendo — though there’s a payoff, to be sure — but with the message that it’s the journey that’s most important and the act of getting there that matters more than whatever level of wash one might find upon arrival. And that payoff, it’s worth noting, is still reasonably restrained, which is telling of the band’s ethic overall — even in their moment of “letting go,” they keep control of the groove enough not to let it get away from them.

It’s not just about restraint or control, of course, as Further‘s rampant melody, rhythm and exploration head them out into a space rock of their own making. The penultimate cut “Collision” is a departure in length at just 5:37 and finds the band coming to ground in a reasonably straightforward movement, the lead guitar line winding out over organ where vocals otherwise might be but not simply taking their place so much as doing things a human voice simply couldn’t do in weaving in and out of the accompanying rhythm lines. Percussion and keys and a corresponding proggy shuffle keep “Collision” tied to its surroundings enough that as the song moves into its second half and unfurls a surprising turn into ultra-winding leads and more technical stylizations, it’s still only as inconsistent as it intends to be. The finish is as raucous as Monomyth get on Further, which is fair enough, but it’s still a sustained melody of keys and guitar that ends the track on a long fade, bringing about the first synth rumblings of 17-minute closer “6equj5,” the title of which refers to the ‘Wow! signal’ captured by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope in 1977. The Big Ear project is to listen for extraterrestrial radio transmissions, and that detected wave remains the best candidate discovered.

So Monomyth, then, are working with a more cosmic palette on the finisher, and the increased scale is a fair enough representation of that, but the patience in the track too befits its space-centric title. A swirl of synth and guitar soloing has taken hold by about five and a half minutes in, though the band seem to have gotten there through only the most hypnotic of means, taken their time rather than rushed through a build. It’s a marked and willful contrast, of course, to “Collision” just before, but as “6equj5” divides into its component movements, it does so only on its own terms, bringing changes and surges of volume where it will as it moves into its second half before getting quieter and stretching out a line of organ across a more rushing current of guitar and steady drums. The grand finale? Sure, and one that consumes the better part of the last six minutes of the song. A ‘Wow! signal’ unto itself, “6equj5” culminates in as fervent a wash as Monomyth have created anywhere on Further and pushes through to an ending of residual noise suddenly cut off rather than faded out, which seems like one last directed choice intended to shock the listener into the realization that the journey has capped. And so it has.

The band have released two more full-lengths since Further in the form of 2016’s Exo and 2019’s Orbis Quadrantis, and they’ve become fixtures at continental European festivals like Desertfest Berlin and Belgium, Roadburn and so on. They’re booked for Freak Valley in June and the Burg Herzberg Festival in August — both in Germany — though of course those plans like everything else have no doubt been rendered “shrug? here’s hoping?” by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whatever happens there, it seemed important to emphasize the sense of purpose and control that Monomyth brought to the writing and construction of Further, from the making of the material itself to the fact that the tracks got longer as they went — “Collision” notwithstanding, but even that was intentional. In chaotic times, sometimes it’s just a relief to know that it’s possible to have a handle on anything, ever, and that’s what I’m taking from Further these six years after its release.

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

—

I got The Pecan about 20 minutes after he woke up. He usually takes a few minutes to wake up and I’ve found it’s best if you let him handle that process on his own rather than burst in and bug him right away. By the time I got upstairs, there was poop on the wall. Not that he’d actively spread it there or anything, but it was up his back out of his diaper and he’d rubbed his back on the wall. The outfit he was wearing I just threw out. He went in the tub and I gave him a bath while The Patient Mrs. took care of the bedroom. I got bit twice in the process of washing him off. He got me later too on the back of my arm when I wasn’t looking and again on my shoulder as I was putting him in the car after that, I guess just to remind me I’m a fucking asshole.

Fair enough.

We went in the car early because we had to leave the house because he was too miserable to eat and there’s nothing else to do. We drove to Newark and looked at cherry blossoms in a park at The Patient Mrs.’ suggestion. They weren’t all out and the ground was wet because apparently it rained overnight, but whatever. It was a thing to do. Two hours, a granola bar, a cheese stick and other assorted snackies later, it was at least a partial reset, and the day very, very, very much needed one.

I haven’t been sleeping all week and I’m fucking miserable. Chicken and egg, right?

We’re still going out to grocery stores and all that. Social distancing, washing hands, all that coronavirus shit is what it is. I don’t think New Jersey will have to shelter in place like San Francisco, and even if we did, I don’t think we’d be arrested for taking a walk through the neighborhood, so we’ll see. It’s hard. It fucking sucks. It could be worse I guess. Everybody is anxious. Everybody is miserable. Everybody is covered in shit. No one is sick at the moment.

Except my nephew, who has the flu. Kid’s always got the flu.

Anyway. Next week is the Quarterly Review. I have no idea how, but that’s the plan.

Today’s a new episode of the Gimme show. 5PM Eastern. Listen at http://gimmeradio.com.

Other that and my anxiety-driven desire to consume garlic en masse, that’s all I’ve got. If you wanted to bludgeon me with a shovel, as long as I didn’t know when it was coming, I don’t think I’d fight you.

Great and safe weekend. Enjoy the memes about washing your hands.

FRM.

The Obelisk Forum

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch