Posted in Reviews on December 6th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
The title Deep Seven Vol. 1 is a stated reference/homage to Deep Six, which came out in 1986 and is regarded as a starting point for grunge for its early assembling the likes of Soundgarden, Green River, Skin Yard and The Melvins, among others. At the time, these were mostly noisy bands trying to feel their way from being punk to something harder, and what came out of it was a generational declaration of themselves in rock and roll and to-date, the only underground rock scene ever to have been picked up by a major label en masse.
A once-in-a-forever happening, and no, I don’t think producers Haldor Grunberg of Satanic Audio and Kamil Ziółkowski of Electric Witch Mountain Recordings, which is the label behind the release and the studio where he seems to have recorded the bulk if not all of it, and features in five of the seven bands included (plus one as a guest), are trying to position Wrocław, Poland, as “the next Seattle.” But, there are parallels to be drawn. The two compilations share an underlying ethic in representing the work of groups and a collective of like-minded artists, working toward their own purposes as individuals, bands, etc., but united in some cases by stylistic similarities (or shared personnel) and in some cases drawn together simply by virtue of making outside-mainstream art in the same city — again, in this case, Wrocław and Poland’s greater Silesian region around it.
These are admirable goals, and with exclusive, new tracks from Palm Desert, Ziółkowski‘s solo-project Mountain of Misery, Solar Trip, Spaceslug, Gozd, O.D.R.A. and Sealess, the 45-minute collection has much to say about the city these bands call home and the sonic elements they share. Perhaps unsurprisingly, among the latter is a strong thread of grunge. This is certainly emphasized in Mountain of Misery‘s “Hollow Water” (5:436 and Spaceslug‘s “Lost in the Tide” (7:36), the latter of which is the centerpiece of the collection and the leadoff of the vinyl edition’s side B, but certainly in the punkier-at-its-root noise rock chug and shout-topped bite of O.D.R.A.‘s “Breslau Babilon” (5:15) — Breslau being an older name for Wrocław — and the despondent atmosphere that begins the subsequent closer “Fading Away” (4:30) by Sealess, there are hints of grunge to be actively or passively heard.
More importantly, that’s not all there is. Spaceslug, who aren’t the longest-tenured here — Palm Desert, whose “Elegy of the Past” (9:22) is both the leadoff and longest track (immediate points), formed in 2008, and O.D.R.A. may go back farther (both bands have Ziółkowski on drums) — are arguably the most known outside of Poland. Their textured, rich interpretation of heavy psychedelia is characteristically fluid in melody and groove on “Lost in the Tide,” which may or may not have some relation to their 2018 LP, Eye the Tide (review here), and comes across as languid but not at all still. The riff is sharper than it seems on first listen, metal-born but heavy-raised. It feels purposeful in its position, not the least for the hypnosis.
“Lost in the Tide” is surrounded on either side by Solar Trip‘s “Blueshift” (6:18) and Gozd‘s “Disguise the Emptiness” (6:22). These are the only two bands in which Ziółkowski isn’t a member, though he contributes recognizable guest backing vocals to the latter, for another aural tie-in, feeling like a linear progression from the psychedelic redirect of Solar Trip — instrumental save for samples and nodding toward modern space-prog in a nonetheless driving movement — through the hypnotic nod of “Lost in the Tide,” and into Gozd, who push even further into open air.
No doubt the fact that these songs were all recorded in the same studio with the same producers between August of this year and last month has something to do with Deep Seven Vol. 1‘s ability to creative this kind of overarching flow; the tracklisting is able to put the listener where it wants them from the moment Palm Desert takeoff from the relatively straight-ahead first half of “Elegy of the Past” to the jammier, trippier second. Mountain of Misery serve as a transition ahead of Solar Trip, Spaceslug and Gozd, and just when you feel like you’re as far out as you can go without the music falling apart around you, O.D.R.A. bring a sudden regrounding and a suckerpunch at the same time. And Sealess not only make sense to finish because they move from the mellow, almost post-heavy fluidity of the early going in “Fading Away” to a more solidified payoff, but the return of vocalist Wojciech Gałuszka from Palm Desert alongside guitar, drums and synth from Ziółkowski and Grunberg‘s production, feels like a bookend to the release as a whole.
And that Ziółkowski and Spaceslug bassist/vocalist Jan Rutka also play in Palm Desert shouldn’t be discounted. Granted, it’s a lot of Ziółkowski front to back as he moves between drumming, singing, keys and guitar in different bands, but his approach seems to be an essential piece of what these same groups are sharing. It’s part of the point, not a thing to hide, is what I’m saying. These bands are supposed to be connected, and they are. That happens in terms of their aesthetic purpose — the blend of psychedelic, heavy, and various niches of rock music — their respective memberships, and of course their geography.
Deep Seven affirms the validity of all of these, and within the broadly varied Polish underground, which is just as likely to produce a Behemoth or a Batushka (or two) as a Dopelord or a Major Kong, casts the included acts as offering something distinct from the rest. They’re not prideful or arrogant about it — at least not in the songs, though O.D.R.A. want nothing for brashness with their Church of Misery-style swing and hardcore-meets-Sabbath overtones — but the message that these groups and this region have something to offer listeners is resonant in the material itself. For that alone, one hopes a Vol. 2 or a Deep Eight or whatever it ends up being called surfaces at some point in the future.
Of course, a crucial difference between this comp and Deep Six is that scene was just beginning to take shape where this one is more established — but again, at no point does it feel like Deep Seven is trying to pitch itself to a commercial music infrastructure that simply no longer exists to support it even if it wanted to. Instead, in a context where these sounds can be heard by anyone, anywhere, anytime, on demand, Deep Seven Vol. 1 reaches out and speaks of people and place in stylistic terms, and in so doing captures something special. If you want to call it the ‘Silesian sound’ from here on out, this offers a glimpse at some of what that means.
Posted in Reviews on February 26th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Admittedly, there’s some ambition in my mind calling this the ‘Spring 2024 Quarterly Review.’ I’m done with winter and March starts on Friday, so yeah, it’s kind of a reach as regards the traditional seasonal patterns of Northern New Jersey where I live, but hell, these things actually get decided here by pissing off a rodent. Maybe it doesn’t need to be so rigidly defined after all.
After doing QRs for I guess about nine years now, I finally made myself a template for the back-end layout. It’s not a huge leap, but will mean about five more minutes I can dedicate to listening, and when you’re trying to touch on 50 records in the span of a work week and attempt some semblance of representing what they’re about, five minutes can help. Still, it’s a new thing, and if you see ‘ARTIST’ listed where a band’s name should be or LINK where ‘So and So on Facebook’ goes, a friendly comment letting me know would be helpful.
Thanks in advance and I hope you find something in all of this to come that speaks to you. I’ll try to come up for air at some point.
Quarterly Review #1-10:
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Slift, Ilion
One of the few non-billionaire groups of people who might be able to say they had a good year in 2020, Toulouse, France, spaceblasters Slift signed to Sub Pop on the strength of that wretched year’s Ummon (review here) and the spectacle-laced live shows with which they present their material. Their ideology is cosmic, their delivery markedly epic, and Ilion pushes the blinding light and the rhythmic force directly at you, creating a sweeping momentum contrasted by ambient stretches like that tucked at the end of 12-minute hypnotic planetmaker “The Words That Have Never Been Heard,” the drone finale “Enter the Loop” or any number of spots between along the record’s repetition-churning, willfully-overblown 79-minute course of builds and surging payoffs. A cynic might tell you it’s not anything Hawkwind didn’t do in 1974 offered with modern effects and beefier tones, but, uh, is that really something to complain about? The hype around Ilion hasn’t been as fervent as was for Ummon — it’s a different moment — but Slift have set themselves on a progressive course and in the years to come, this may indeed become their most influential work. For that alone it’s among 2024’s most essential heavy albums, never mind the actual journey of listening. Bands like this don’t happen every day.
The only thing keeping Grin from being punk rock is the fact that they don’t play punk. Otherwise, the self-recording, self-releasing (on The Lasting Dose Records) Berlin metal-sludge slingers tick no shortage of boxes as regards ethic, commitment to an uncompromised vision of their sound, and on Hush, their fourth long-player which features tracks from 2023’s Black Nothingness (review here), they sharpen their attack to a point that reminds of dug-in Swedish death metal on “Pyramid” with a winding lead line threaded across, find post-metallic ambience in “Neon Skies,” steamroll with the groove of the penultimate “The Tempest of Time,” and manage to make even the crushing “Midnight Blue Sorrow” — which arrives after the powerful opening statement of “Hush” “Calice” and “Gatekeeper” — have a sense of creative reach. With Sabine Oberg on bass and Jan Oberg handling drums, guitar, vocals, noise and production, they’ve become flexible enough in their craft to harness raw charge or atmospheric sprawl at will, and through 16 songs and 40 minutes (“Portal” is the longest track at 3:45), their intensity is multifaceted, multi-angular, and downright ripping. Aggression suits this project, but that’s never all that’s happening in Grin, and they’re stronger for that.
A debut solo-band outing from guitarist, bassist, vocalist and songwriter Dave Cotton, also of Seven Nines and Tens, Pontiac‘s Hard Knox lands on strictly limited tape through Coup Sur Coup Records and is only 16 minutes long, but that’s time enough for its six songs to find connections in harmony to Beach Boys and The Beatles while sometimes dropping to a singular, semi-spoken verse in opener/longest track (immediate points, even though four minutes isn’t that long) “Glory Ragged,” which moves in one direction, stops, reorients, and shifts between genres with pastoralism and purpose. Cotton handles six-string and 12-string, but isn’t alone in Pontiac, as his Seven Nines and Tens bandmate Drew Thomas Christie handles drums, Adam Vee adds guitar, drums, a Coke bottle and a Brita filter, and CJ Wallis contributes piano to the drifty textures of “Road High” before “Exotic Tattoos of the Millennias” answers the pre-christofascism country influence shown on “Counterculture Millionaire” with an oldies swing ramble-rolling to a catchy finish. For fun I’ll dare a wild guess that Cotton‘s dad played that stuff when he was a kid, as it feels learned through osmosis, but I have no confirmation of that. It is its own kind of interpretation of progressive music, and as the beginning of a new exploration, Cotton opens doors to a swath of styles that cross genres in ways few are able to do and remain so coherent. Quick listen, and it dares you to keep up with its changes and patterns, but among its principal accomplishments is to make itself organic in scope, with Cotton cast as the weirdo mastermind in the center. They’ll reportedly play live, so heads up.
Already fluid as they open with the rocker “Into the Space,” exclamatory Chilean five-piece The Polvos! delve into more psychedelic reaches in “Fire Dance” and the jammy and (appropriately) floaty midsection of “Going Down,” the centerpiece of their 35-minute sophomore LP, Floating. That song bursts to life a short time later and isn’t quite as immediate as the charge of “Into the Space,” but serves as a landmark just the same as “Acid Waterfall” and “The Anubis Death” hold their tension in the drums and let the guitars go adventuring as they will. There’s maybe some aspect of Earthless influence happening, but The Polvos! meld that make-it-bigger mentality with traditional verse/chorus structures and are more grounded for it even as the spaces created in the songs give listeners an opportunity for immersion. It may not be a revolution in terms of style, but there is a conversation happening here with modern heavy psych from Europe as well that adds intrigue, and the band never go so far into their own ether so as to actually disappear. Even after the shreddy finish of “The Anubis Death,” it kind of feels like they might come back out for an encore, and you know, that’d be just fine.
The Cosmic Gospel, Cosmic Songs for Reptiles in Love
With a current of buzz-fuzz drawn across its eight component tracks that allow seemingly disparate moves like the Blondie disco keys in “Hot Car Song” to emerge from the acoustic “Core Memory Unlocked” before giving over to the weirdo Casio-beat bounce of “Psychrolutes Marcidus Man,” a kind of ’60s character reimagined as heavy bedroom indie, The Cosmic Gospel‘s Cosmic Songs for Reptiles in Love isn’t without its resentments, but the almost-entirely-solo-project of Mercata, Italy-based multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Medina is more defined by its sweetness of melody and gentle delivery on the whole. An experiment like the penultimate “Wrath and Gods” carries some “Revolution 9” feel, but Medina does well earlier to set a broad context amid the hook of opener “It’s Forever Midnight” and the subsequent, lightly dub beat and keyboard focus on “The Richest Guy on the Planet is My Best Friend,” such that when closer “I Sew Your Eyes So You Don’t See How I Eat Your Heart” pairs the malevolent intent of its title with light fuzzy soloing atop an easy flowing, summery flow, the album has come to make its own kind of sense and define its path. This is exactly what one would most hope for it, and as reptiles are cold-blooded, they should be used to shifts in temperature like those presented throughout. Most humans won’t get it, but you’ve never been ‘most humans,’ have you?
Massachusetts garage doomers Grave Speaker‘s self-titled debut was issued digitally by the band this past Fall and was snagged by Electric Valley Records for a vinyl release. The Mellotron melancholia that pervades the midsection of the eponymous “Grave Speaker” justifies the wax, but the cult-leaning-in-sound-if-not-theme outfit that marks a new beginning for ex-High n’ Heavy guitarist John Steele unfurl a righteously dirty fuzz over the march of “Blood of Old” at the outset and then immediately up themselves in the riffy stoner delve of “Earth and Mud.” The blown-out vocals on the latter, as well as the far-off-mic rawness of “The Bard’s Theme” that surrounds its Hendrixian solo, remind of a time when Ice Dragon roamed New England’s troubled woods, and if Grave Speaker will look to take on a similar trajectory of scope, they do more than drop hints of psychedelia here, in “Grave Speaker” and elsewhere, but they’re no more beholden to that than the Sabbathism of capper “Make Me Crawl” or the cavernous echo of “Earthbound.” It’s an initial collection, so one expects they’ll range some either way with time, but the way the production becomes part of the character of the songs speaks to a strong idea of aesthetic coming through, and the songwriting holds up to that.
While at the same time proffering his most expansive vision yet of a progressive psychedelia weighted in tone, emotionally expressive and able to move its focus fluidly between its layers of keyboard, synth and guitar such that the mix feels all the more dynamic and the material all the more alive (there’s an entire sub-plot here about the growth in self-production; a discussion for another time), Surya Kris Peters‘ 10-song/46-minute There’s Light in the Distance also brings the former Samsara Blues Experiment guitarist/vocalist closer to uniting his current projects than he’s yet been, the distant light here blurring the line where Surya Kris Peters ends and the emergently-rocking Fuzz Sagrado begins. This process has been going on for the last few years following the end of his former outfit and a relocation from Germany to Brazil, but in its spacious second half as well as the push of its first, a song like “Mode Azul” feels like there’s nothing stopping it from being played on stage beyond personnel. Coinciding with that are arrangement details like the piano at the start of “Life is Just a Dream” or the synth that gives so much movement under the echoing lead in “Let’s Wait Out the Storm,” as Peters seems to find new avenues even as he works his way home to his own vision of what heavy rock can be.
Unilateralis is the four-song follow-up EP to Polish heavydelvers Gozd‘s late-2023 debut album, This is Not the End, and its 20-plus minutes find a place for themselves in a doom that feels both traditional and forward thinking across eight-minute opener and longest track (immediate points, even for an EP) “Somewhere in Between” before the charge of “Rotten Humanity” answers with brasher thrust and aggressive-undercurrent stoner rock with an airy post-metallic break in the middle and rolling ending. From there, “Thanatophobia” picks up the energy from its ambient intro and explodes into its for-the-converted nod, setting up a linear build after its initial verses and seeing it through with due diligence in noise, and closer “Tentative Minds” purposefully hypnotizes with its vague-speech in the intro and casual bassline and drum swing before the riff kicks in for the finale. The largesse of its loudest moments bolster the overarching atmosphere no less than the softest standalone guitar parts, and Gozd seem wholly comfortable in the spaces between microgenres. A niche among niches, but that’s also how individuality happens, and it’s happening here.
You wouldn’t accuse Austria’s Sativa Root of thematic subtlety on their third album, Kings of the Weed Age, which broadcasts a stoner worship in offerings like “Megalobong” and “Weedotaur” and probably whatever “F.A.T.” stands for, but that’s not what they’re going for anyway. With its titular intro starting off, spoken voices vague in the ambience, “Weedotaur”‘s 11 minutes lumber with all due bong-metallian slog, and the crush becomes central to the proceedings if not necessarily unipolar in terms of the band’s approach. That is to say, amid the onslaught of volume and tonal density in “Green Smegma” and the spin-your-head soloing in “Assassins Weed” (think Assassins Creed), the instrumentalist course undertaken may be willfully monolithic, but they’re not playing the same song five times on six tracks and calling it new. “F.A.T.” begins on a quiet stretch of guitar that recalls some of YOB‘s epics, complementing both the intro and “Weedotaur,” before bringing its full weight down on the listener again as if to underscore the message of its stoned instrumental catharsis on its way out the door. They sound like they could do this all day. It can be overwhelming at times, but that’s not really a complaint.
Comprised of guitarist/vocalist Mateusz, bassist Michał and drummer Tomek, Polish riffcrafters Volt Ritual are appealingly light on pretense as they offer Return to Jupiter‘s four tracks, and though as a Star Trek fan I can’t get behind their lyrical impugning of Starfleet as they imagine what Earth colonialism would look like to a somehow-populated Jupiter, they’re not short on reasons to be cynical, if in fact that’s what’s happening in the song. “Ghostpolis” follows the sample-laced instrumental opener “Heavy Metal is Good for You” and rolls loose but accessible even in its later shouts before the more uptempo “Gwiazdolot” swaps English lyrics for Polish (casting off another cultural colonialization, arguably) and providing a break ahead of the closing title-track, which is longer at 7:37 and a clear focal point for more than just bearing the name of the EP, summarizing as it does the course of the cuts before it and even bringing a last scream as if to say “Ghostpolis” wasn’t a fluke. Their 2022 debut album began with “Approaching Jupiter,” and this Return feels organically built off that while trying some new ideas in its effects and general structure. One hopes the plot continues in some way next time along this course.
