Posted in Whathaveyou on October 29th, 2019 by JJ Koczan
Spinda Records will celebrate its second anniversary on Nov. 23 by hosting the inaugural edition of what it has suitably dubbed Spinda Fest. It’s a three-band bill — now that’s the kind of festival I can get behind — with a free warm-up show before that Doctor Sax are playing, and the fest proper will feature Viaje a 800, Bourbon and Grajo. In Algeciras, which is in the Andalusian home region of the bands. Fucking cool, right? Viaje a 800 have done just a handful of shows to this point celebrating the reissues of their first two records — which I very much need to review and kind of can’t believe I haven’t yet; enough that I just stopped writing this sentence and went and looked to double-check that I hadn’t, and nope, not there — and this will be the next one, and they’ll be joined for it by two more than companionable outfits of similar heavy psychedelic intent. What I’m saying here is if you can get there, you should. It’ll be cool.
Here’s the info, as run through a major internet company’s translation matrix and tweaked by me to preserve titles and whatnot:
What better way to celebrate the second anniversary of Spinda Records than with a party surrounded by friends?
VIAJE A 800 / Heavy Psych: after 2 years of celebrations with the reissues of ‘Estampida de trombones’ and ‘Diablo roto dë …’, and their performances at the Festival Sound Isidro de Madrid and at SonicBlast Moledo (Portugal), those of La Novena had to finish celebrating their 20th Anniversary as a band with a pitch at home, where they did not play since 2012. If you did not have the opportunity to see them on their previous dates of this year, do not miss this one because he finds out when they get back on stage … Madness is coming! Ready to scream?
BOURBON / Psych Hard Rock: after kicking Spain with their most recent work ‘Fuente Vieja’ (among the best albums of 2018 according to many national media), those from Sanlúcar arrive at the Spinda Fest to make us fly with their particular way of understanding the hard rock; full of Andalusian psychedelia and folklore. If you have not seen them live, you do not know what you are missing; and if you’ve seen them, your repeat fixed … what if?
GRAJO / Space Doom Rock: like a true steamroller, that’s how Grajo sounds on stage. If you still had a good ear, you have little left because they are going to burst on the basis of the best doom that is done today in Spain, seasoned with a lot of space rock and Andalusian essence. Crushing rhythms and sidereal journeys, with a simply “unique” voice. A little jewel, come on!
Well, we’ve reached the end of the week if not the end of the Quarterly Review itself. That’s right: after hemming and hawing all week and going back and forth in my silly little brain, I’ve decided to extend this edition to a sixth day, which will be Monday. That means 60 reviews in six days, not 50 in five. Honestly, I could probably keep going for three or four more beyond that if I had the time or inclination, and I may get there someday, but I’m definitely not there now.
But hey, there have been a couple comments left along the way, so thanks for that. I appreciate you taking the time to read if you have. Here’s the last for the week and we’ll pick back up on Monday.
Quarterly Review #41-50:
All Them Witches, Lost and Found EP
If Nashville four-piece All Them Witches put together the free-download Lost and Found EP simply as a means of getting their take on the folk song “Hares on the Mountain” out there, it was worth it. In the hands of vocalist/bassist Michael Parks, Jr., guitarist Ben McLeod, Rhodes specialist/violinist Allan Van Cleave and drummer Robby Staebler, the traditional tune becomes a wide open dronescape, bristling and vague like memory itself. It’s beautiful and a little confusing in just the right way, and it comes accompanied on the short release by the Fleetwood Mac cover “Before the Beginning,” an even-more-subdued take on “Call Me Star” from 2015’s New West Records debut, Dying Surfer Meets His Maker (review here), and a dub redux of “Open Passageways” – called, of course, “Dub Passageways” – from the same album. Might be a stopgap between full-lengths, but still, at 18 minutes, it’d make a more than worthy 10” release if they were looking for something new for the merch table.
Next time you feel like, “Hey man, I’m so freaked out and weird and wow man whatever blah blah,” just take a second to remember you live in a dimension where dudes from The Heads have side-projects. Paul Allen and Anthroprophh – his trio with Gareth Turner and Jesse Webb, otherwise known as the duo Big Naturals – are a freaked out freakout’s freakout. The stuff of psychedelic mania. And that’s only on the first disc of the 2CD Omegavlle (Rocket Recordings). By the time they get around to the three-song second disc and dig into extended trips like “Omegaille/THOTHB” (14:48) and the subsequent finale, “Journey out of Omegaville and into the…” (20:57), they’re so far gone into noise and captured, manipulated audio that who the hell knows where we’ve ended up? At 88 minutes, the limits of manageability are long left behind, but to get some of the Velvet Underground-in-space vibes of “Maschine” in trade for undertaking the undertaking it’s well worth letting go of the rigidity of things like time, place, etc.
I’m pretty sure Orphan Gears used the Super Mario Bros. font for their logo on the cover of their latest EP, Rat Race, and for that, they should be saluted. The gritty-riffing semi-punker London four-piece offer five tracks and 20 minutes of workaday, boozy grooves, blowing off steam after putting in a shift at this or that crappy job. They are null as regards pretense, and ask little more of their audience than perhaps a beer from the stage or whatever else might be on the menu that night. They share initials, but unlike much of the London underground, they share little ultimately with Orange Goblin in terms of style, despite the shuffle of “Tough Luck, BJ” or the harmonica at the end of “Bitch-Slapped Blues,” and by the time they get to the classic strut of the title-track, they seem to be dug into AC/DC-style groove in the verse while blending in modern heavy rock impulses around it. They clearly save their best for last.
An immediately cogent, professional debut full-length is about what you’d expect from The Watchers, the San Francisco four-piece with members of SpiralArms, Orchid and Black Gates in their ranks, particularly after their prior EP, Sabbath Highway (review here), but that doesn’t stop the songwriting from impressing across the eight-song long-player, Black Abyss (on Ripple Music). The band’s presentation is crisp and pro-shop all the way through, from the soloing on “Oklahoma Black Magic” to the keyboard-laced Tony–Martin-era-Sabbathism-meets-tambourine of “Suffer Fool” later on, and with the opening salvo of the title-track and “Alien Lust” right behind it, The Watchers set a quick expectation for hooks and a high standard of delivery that, thankfully, they show no hesitation in living up to for the duration, the chug-and-roll finale “Seven Tenets” satisfies in mood and efficiency, departing into airy guitar meditation and making its way back for a suitably rocking sendoff. Dudes know what they’re doing, where they’re headed and how they want to get there. All the listener needs to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.
A sequel to their 2015 full-length, Slowgod II (on Underground Legends Records, Spinda Records and DHU Records), sees Córdoba-based four-piece Grajo dug into a deep-toned psychedelic doom. There are flashes of Eastern influence on “Malmuerta,” with frontwoman Liz crooning over the minor-key guitar noodling of Josef, the forward motion in Félix’s drums and the heft of Pistolo’s bass. That dynamic works across Slowgod II, from opener and longest track (immediate points) “Altares” through its closing eight-minute counterpart “Malstrom,” which moves from early crunch through spacious volume swells in its middle only to regain composure and offer a heavy post-rock payoff that, somehow, still isn’t that atmospherically removed from the swinging “Horror and Pleasure” right before it or the similarly speedier “Queen Cobra” that follows “Altares” at the outset. Definitely one for the converted, Grajo deliver tones thick enough to stand on and engaging melodicism without falling into any real traps of sonic redundancy, varying their pace effectively and conjuring consuming plod on “ER” while still holding to that notion of breadth that seems to unite all their material here.
It just so happens this is exactly what the fuck I’m talking about. After releasing their Land Between Rivers (review here) LP through El Paraiso Records last year, the Copenhagen four-piece of Emil Thorenfeldt, Frederik Denning, Kasper Andersen and Rasmus “Cleaver” Christensen, collectively known as Mythic Sunship, return with four more slabs of exploratory bliss on Upheaval. Either completely or partially improvised, “Tectonic Beach” (12:42), “Aether Flux” (10:55), “Cosmic Rupture” (6:44) and “Into Oblivion” (13:56) flow together like the work of masters, and with shades of patient space rock at their core, the tracks are infused with life even beyond the spontaneity of their creation. Heavy jams. Heavy, spacy jams. Molten. Swirling. Badass. Even the shorter and more forward “Cosmic Rupture” is headed out of the atmosphere, and when they come around to the noisy payoff deep in “Into Oblivion,” it’s abundantly clear they’re not joking around when it comes to the title. You can get onboard with Mythic Sunship, or you can miss out. Bands like this separate the hip from the squares.
Those who miss the days when Mastodon or Baroness howled their shouts into a landscape of crunching tonal largesse might do well to dig into what Vancouver, British Columbia’s Empress have to offer on their late-2017 debut EP, Reminiscence. The 27-minute five-tracker isn’t without its sense of melody – there’s plenty of room in eight-minute second cut “Immer” – but guitarist/vocalist Peter Sacco, bassist Brenden Gunn and drummer Chris Doyle make their primary impression via the impact of their material, and as they swap back and forth between shorter tracks and longer ones, a sense of structural playfulness results that moves through the bass openings of “Baptizer” (2:50) and “They Speak Like Trees” (9:27) into the ambient guitar finisher “Dawn,” and the feeling is that, like their stylistic forebears in at the time what was thought of as a new take on sludge metal, Empress will only grow more progressive as they move forward from this first outing. One hopes they hold firm to the tectonic weight they present here that so many others seem to have given up along the way.
Released some six years after Monads’ 2011 debut, Intellectus Iudicat Veritatem, the Aesthetic Death Records-issued IVIIV was, according to the Belgian five-piece’s own accounting, in the works for most of that time in one way or another. One might say, therefore, that its creation does justice to the glacial pace of some of its slowest moments, the crawling death-doom extremity of pieces like “To a Bloodstained Shore,” or the lurch before the gallop takes hold in “Your Wounds Were My Temple.” At four songs and 50 minutes, IVIIV is indicative enough of the style, but Monads legitimately showcase a persona of their own in and out of those genre confines, the melancholic atmosphere and expanded arrangement elements (piano, etc.) of 15-minute closer “The Despair of an Aeon” creatively used if familiar, and the smoothness of the transitions in opener “Leviathan as My Lament” setting a tone of scope as well as downward emotional trajectory. Not sure I’d count on a quick turnaround for a follow-up, but if half a decade from now a new Monads record surfaces, it’ll be worth keeping an eye out for.
Rolling from its untitled intro through its untitled outro through a barrage of charred-black, bludgeoning sludge extremity, the debut album from Lexington, Kentucky’s Nest, Metempsychosis (on Sludgelord Records), refers in its title to a transmigration of the soul, an inheritance almost as much as reincarnation. The band may be talking about themselves or they may be working on a theme throughout the record’s seven proper tracks, I don’t know, but if the idea is destruction and rebirth, they certainly sound more interested in the former. Songs like “Heretic” seethe and scour, while the lumbering and spacious closer “Life’s Grief,” capping with abrasive noise, would seem to be a mission statement in itself. Individual pieces like “Jewel of Iniquity” and the preceding atmosphere-into-mega-crush “Diving into the Entrails of Sheep” – of course the centerpiece of the tracklisting – are shorter unto themselves, but like everything else that surrounds, they feed into an overarching ambience of disgust and chaos.
There are some issues as regards the balance of the mix pushing the vocals forward ahead of the guitar to work out, but Moscow’s Redneck Spaceship impress all the same with the intent and execution of their late-2017 self-released debut, Grand Marshal Ape. In riffs and songcraft, their influences stem from the classic days of stoner rock, but from opener “The Sands of Dakar” and the later “That Sounds Nuts,” one gets a vibe of underlying punk influence, while the twang in harmonized highlight “On the Roadside” and slide guitar of “Maverick” lends a Southern, bluesy swing that the penultimate “Enchained” answers back later ahead of the sample-laden psychedelic jam-out closer, “Antariksh,” which strikes as a far cry from the ultra-straightforward presentation earlier on “Empty Pockets,” but speaks to an immediate scope in Redneck Spaceship’s sound. One hopes they continue to meld elements as they progress beyond Grand Marshal Ape and bridge the gap between one side of their moniker and the other.
Posted in Whathaveyou on January 5th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Certainly Spanish doom rockers Grajo have their classic-style elements in play, as they showed on their 2016 self-titled debut, but there’s a touch of nuance there as well, and as we’re still in the first week of 2018, they’re the second pickup confirmed by DHU Records, which has sent along the info for the vinyl release of the second Grajo album, Slowgod II. No set issue date as yet — put it in the “coming soon” file — but along with Son of the Morning, Grajo join a building roster of acts for the emergent imprint, which already seems to be looking to make a mark on the New Year.
Art and info follow:
Grajo ~ SLOWGOD II (DHU025)
Sophomore album released through DHU Records in 2018!
DHU Records is proud to announce to once again collaborate with the mighty GRAJO from Cordoba, Spain to release their second album SLOWGOD II on limited edition vinyl!
As with their first Self Titled album GRAJO is known to experiment with more sounds than just the mighty riff pounding you relentlesly, by using the Theremin, for instance, to create more atmosphere yet retaining a massive wall of Doom to pull the listener in and captivate mesmerically. So it is no wonder that they continue to dive off the deep end and rough up the ordinary to pull you into their brand of Heavy Psych Doom Metal.
The artwork will once again be provided by Antonio Ramírez Mentes de Ácido who did the artwork for the first Self Titled record.
GRAJO ~ SLOWGOD II (DHU025) Tracklist: A1. Altares 8:38 A2. Queen Cobra 4:37 A3. Malmuerta 4:53 B1. Er 7:12 B2. Horror And Pleasure 4:53 B3. Malstrøm 8:05
As with all DHU Records releases SLOWGOD II will be released on limited edition vinyl:
SLOWGOD Edition DHU Exclusive Limited to 90 copies Gatefold jacket Black poly-lined innersleeves Hand numbered DHU Exclusive card Comes on Clear/White Half/Half w/ Purple Splatter 12″ vinyl
Queen Cobra Edition Limited to 150 copies Gatefold jacket Black poly-lined innersleeves Comes on Milky Clear w/ Orange, Blue and Purple Splatter 12″ vinyl
SLOWGOD II will also be released on CD through Underground Legends Records
Posted in Whathaveyou on February 19th, 2016 by JJ Koczan
The tracks have been online at Nooirax Productions and La Choza de Doe since December, but the vinyl just reportedly came in this week for the new split release between Spanish outfits Atavismo and Grajo. One song from each is featured along with some decidedly manic artwork, and as you can hear below, it’s a decidedly different take from each group that still resides under the umbrella of heavy.
For Atavismo, whose Desintegración (review here) debut continues to haunt in the best way possible, they give a spacier push on their “Haribo,” repeating the title line in Hawkwindian style and calling to mind a richly cosmic vibe. Grajo, who will reportedly unveil their own debut later this year through DHU Records, present a decidedly doomier take, with dense low end and fuzz guitars topped by ethereal and echoing vocals, the six-minute “Feeding Our Demons” building to a thick head of riffy wash.
Both cuts have something to offer, and since at this point I’ll take whatever Atavismo are willing to give, I’ll take this as a glimpse of where they might at least in part be headed after their first record. Dig it:
Finally in our hands the coveted split 7 ” Atavismo / Grajo… By this time, we only have it available for direct sale at concerts or in hand, but if you want to be with him, you can purchase it through Nooirax Producciones and / or La Choza de Doe.
