Posted in Whathaveyou on April 15th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
New York’s Guhts was formed by Scott and Amber Burns of Witchkiss during lockdown madness, and their debut 2021 EP, Blood Feather (review here), was duly restless, seeking and unsettled. They’ve had some shifts as a lineup has solidified — they were joined by house-drummer-to-the-universe Andy Patterson for a hot minute there — and now Brian Clemens steps into the drummer role for the live incarnation of the band that will play with Netherlands and Lotus Thrones and Trip Villain en route to Maryland Doom Fest 2022, offering a strong signal toward further live work in the future. Nice, now that it can happen. And cool to see Guhts start to gel on a terrestrial level.
Guhts head out in order to support that first release, and perhaps in part to herald the follow-up, which is in progress now. It’s not an especially long tour — five shows — but it’s the first one for Guhts, and as they move toward recording and releasing their first full-length too, it seems all the more worth marking the occasion. Onward, and so forth.
If you didn’t hear the EP, it’s streaming at the bottom of this post. I’m looking forward to hearing how they branch out on the album to come. Wonder what label is going to snag the release.
Dates from the PR wire:
GUHTS – June Tour Announcement
The members of New York’s Avant Garde Post – Metal act GUHTS are no strangers to touring and playing live. Hailing from other bands such as Witchkiss, Sleaping Dreaming and Black Mountain Hunger, collectively GUHTS have logged countless hours and miles of live experience. Having only just formed in 2020 during the pandemic and with their members in both New York and North Carolina, up until now GUHTS have done everything remotely, including the recording and release of their debut EP “blood feather” in August of 2021.
This June that all will change though when GUHTS hits the road for the first time on an east coast tour with shows in VT, ME, NY, PA and then culminating with a performance at the “Maryland Doom Fest” in Frederick, MD. To make things even more exciting, Three One G Records Experimental Future Sludge Rock magicians NETHERLANDS from Brooklyn, NY will be coming along to headline the first four shows!
Also joining in on the fun will be new friends Psych Metal band “TRIP VILLAIN” from Brooklyn, NY playing the ME & NY shows and Post – Industrial outfit “LOTUS THRONES” (members of Wolvhammer, Rosetta, Krieg & Sunburster) from Philadelphia, PA playing the NY & PA shows!
GUHTS Live rehearsals just started with new drummer Brian Clemens (Sleaping Dreaming) for the June tour and the band is ecstatic with the energy and focus Brian is bringing to the mix.
Also, GUHTS just recently wrapped up the pre-production of their full length album and have plans of hitting the studio after the June tour to record, with hopes of an early 2023 release.
But for now, go see GUHTS on tour in June, trust me you’ll be happy you did!
Tour Info: June 22 – Winooski, VT @ Monkey House w/ Netherlands June 23 – Portland, ME @ Sun Tiki Studios w/ Tripp Villain & Netherlands (tickets) June 24 – Brooklyn, NY @ Kingsland w/ Tripp Villain, Lotus Thrones & Netherlands June 25 – Philadelphia, PA @ Kung Fu Necktie w/ Lotus Thrones & Netherlands June 26 – Frederick, MD @ Cafe 611 “Maryland Doom Fest” *GUHTS only
GUHTS are: Amber Burns – Vocals Scott Prater – Guitar & Synth Dan Shaneyfelt – Guitar & Synth Daniel Martinez – Bass Brian Clemens – Drums
Posted in Reviews on September 28th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Everybody come through day one intact? I know it got pretty weird there for a minute, but I felt like sense was ultimately made. Maybe not in all cases, but definitely most. Today also gets fairly wild, and some of this stuff has been covered before in some fashion and some of it not so much, but hell, you’ve been through this before, as have I, so you know what to expect when you’re expecting. Blood might be spilled. Bruises left. Or bliss. Or both sometimes. Hell’s bells. Let’s go already.
Quarterly Review #11-20:
Kal-El, Dark Majesty
With their fifth full-length, Dark Majesty, Norwegian heavy rockers and sci-fi-themed cleavage aficionados Kal-El make a willful play toward the epic. Their first 2LP and their first album for Majestic Mountain Records, the eight-song offering tops 65 minutes and splits into four two-song sides, each one seeming to grow bigger until the last of them, with the closing duo “Kala Mishaa” and “Vimana,” draws the proceedings to a massive close. Along the way, Kal-El not only offer their most melodically rich and spacious fare to-date — opening with their longest track in the 11:39 “Temple” (immediate points) — but blast Kyuss into the cosmos on the four-minute “Spiral,” and give Dozer a run for their money on “Comêta.” Gargantuan fuzz shines through on “Hyperion” in a near-maddening cacophony, but it might be the title-track that’s the greatest highlight in the end, marking the band’s accomplishment in heft, blending riffs and atmosphere to a broad and engaging degree. It is a triumph and it sounds like one.
One would not accuse Melbourne’s The Ugly Kings of inaccuracy in titling their second album Strange, Strange Times, and though they launch with the post-Queens of the Stone Age title-track and the now-tinged cynicism of “Technodrone” and “Do You Feel Like You’re Paranoid?,” it’s in even moodier stretches like “Last Man Left Alive” they cast their lot toward individualism. Songs vary in intention but remain consistent in the quality of their construction and look-at-the-world-around-you theme, with “Lawman” leaning toward darker country blues, “Mr. Hyde” asking what would happen if Clutch and Ruff Majik ever crossed paths and the finale “Another Fucking Day” offering a deceptively immersive unfurling. I can’t help but wonder if The Ugly Kings feel surrounded in their home city by much, much druggier neo-psych acts in the heavy underground scene, but the clarity of purpose they bring to their songwriting would make them a standout one way or the other.
Atmospheric and seething in kind, Guhts brings together members of New Yorkers Witchkiss and North Carolina’s Black Mountain Hunger for a pandemic-era debut release that in style explores the restlessness and the overwhelming nature of the age. With Amber Burns (interview here) on vocals, the drums programmed behind Scott Prater and Dan Shaneyfelt guitars/synths and the bass of Jesse Van Note, and a purpose wrought in immersion, the band distinguishes itself in its apropos grimness and in the potential for future exploration of the ideas laid out here, bordering in “The Mirror” on goth only after “Handless Maiden” offers raging, post-metallic lumber. One wonders how Blood Feather will sound five years from now, but more to the point, one wonders what Guhts might conjure in the meantime when/if they press forward. Either way, expect to see this on the list of 2021’s best short releases.
Hey there, psych fans and experts on tragedies of the classic world, British Columbia two-piece Anunnaki have the psychedelic instrumental blowout themed around the murder of Hypatia you’ve been waiting for! Never heard of Hypatia? It doesn’t matter. Samples will provide some context and if they said the whole thing was about going shoe shopping, it wouldn’t be any less righteously far out. With “Golden Gate of the Sun” at the outset, the duo of Dave Read (guitar/bass) and Arlen Thompson (drums/synth) prime a bit of space-boogie, but the subsequent “Cyril, the Fanatic” shoves the freakery to the fore with wailing guitar and drones and seemingly whatever else they thought might work and does. The 15-minute finale, “The Cries of Hypatia,” dives deeper into drone, holding back the drums for about seven minutes while obscure speech and the titular cries unfold. Read and Thompson build it to a full, suitably deathly wash, and take the time to end minimal. Literary, arthouse, but not at all stale for that.
A departure even from his departure, Church of the Cosmic Skull bandleader Bill Fisher‘s second solo offering, Hallucinations of a Higher Truth, follows the darker progressive rock of 2020’s Mass Hypnosis and the Dark Triad (review here) with 40-plus minutes of piano-led singer-songwriter fare, taking a stated influence from the lyrics-as-everyday-musings of Randy Newman on songs like “Better Than You” and “Off to Work,” while revamping his main outfit’s “Answers in Your Soul” and “Evil in Your Eye” to suit the arrangement theme. As Fisher has engaged plenty with classic forms in his work, Hallucinations of a Higher Truth feels by no means beyond his creative reach, and he’s an accomplished enough songwriter and performer to pull it off, thereby demonstrating that if you can craft a song you can make it do whatever the hell you want, and that “you” in this case is him. This isn’t going to be everybody’s thing, but Fisher carries it ably.
Montreal low-end filthmongers Seum return to follow-up earlier 2021’s Winterized EP (review here) with Live From the Seum-Cave, basking in an even rawer incarnation of their guitars-need-not-apply drum/bass/vocals attack. “Sea Sick Six” is even nastier here than it was on the last EP, and the eponymous opener “Seum” is an anthem of disaffection that finds its lyrical answer in “Life Grinder” and “Blueberry Cash” alike — the why-do-I-even-have-this-shit-job point of view as unmistakable as the throat-singing that pops up in the aforementioned “Sea Sick Six.” The trio are beastly on “Winter of Seum,” and they make a special highlight of “Super Tanker” from 2020’s Summer of Seum EP, working tempo shifts into the punishing march that are less than predictable and yet totally over the top in their extremity. This is a good band who genuinely sound like they don’t give a fuck. That’s a hard thing to make believable. I hope they never put out a record and do EPs forever.
Spirit Adrift have broken out from the doomly mire to proffer clear-headed, soaring traditional heavy metal. The unit, led as ever by guitarist/bassist/vocalist Nate Garrett with Marcus Bryant on drums, offer three new tracks on Forge Your Future in the title-track, “Wake Up” and “Invisible Enemy,” channeling Randy Rhoads even through more denser tonality and the nodding groove of the last. Echo behind Garrett‘s vocals reminds here and there of Brian “Butch” Balich of Penance/Argus, but Spirit Adrift‘s path across four full-lengths and companion short releases like this one over the last six years has been its own, and the emergence of Garrett as a singer has been a crucial part of making these songs the concise epics they are. Crisp in craft and confident in delivery, Spirit Adrift only sound like masters of their domain here, and so they are. Heavy metal that loves heavy metal.
The Chicago-based three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Eric Ervin, bassist/vocalist Dana “Erv” Ervin and drummer/backing vocalist Ted Sciaky plunge deep with their self-titled debut into the ’90s era of heavy rock, with vibes running between C.O.C., Monster Magnet, Clutch and Kyuss, among others, but there’s a might-throw-elbows spirit that comes through even in willfully spacious pieces like “I’m Free” (some Lemmy influence there too) and “Wizards & Gods” that adds aggro spirit to the bulk of the nine-song/39-minute affair, a piece like “D.B. Blues” — which stands for “Dirty Bitch Blues” — as unpretentious in its overarching style as it is politically incorrect. “Fogginess” hits near eight minutes and moves toward the trippier end of grunge, with one of the outing’s many layered solos playing out amid the solid groove beneath, the band refusing to compromise their abiding lack of pretense even in the face of that which would otherwise be psychedelic. Not much time for that nonsense — there’s crunch to be had.
3rd Ear Experience, Danny Frankel’s 3rd Ear Experience
Who’s Danny Frankel? Long story short, he was Lou Reed‘s drummer, but in fact he’s got a session-player career that’s found him performing with a staggering array of artists and bands. He puts his stamp on his very own 3rd Ear Experience alongside the group’s founding guitarist Robbi Robb as well as a host of others including fellow founder AmritaKripa, synthesist Scott “Dr. Space” Heller and more besides. The resulting journey is six tracks and 63 minutes of psychedelic gloryscaping, desert-born but galaxy-bred, with longform works like “What Are Their Names” (18:18), “Weep No More, My Friend” (14:49) and closer “Timelessness Pt. 2” (12:03) expanding across exploratory and fluid movements offset by shorter stretches like the suitably percussive “Cosmos Glazed Elephant.” In opener “A Beautiful Questions,” the drums hardly feature, but the lead-in for “What Are Their Names” feels no less intentional than when the penultimate “Timelessness Pt. 1” gives way to silence ahead of the beginning of the finale. I’d say more, but I seem to have lost my train of hyperbole-laden praise. Wonderfully so.
Originally recorded in 2006, Solarius‘s heretofore unreleased four-song EP, Universal Trial, is notable for predating the self-titled Graveyard album, as guitarist/vocalist Jonatan Ramm would end up joining that band in 2008, seeming after Solarius dissolved. The 21-minute release arrives now with the considerable backing of Heavy Psych Sounds in no small part because of that nifty bit of context, and the classic-style boogie wrought in “Sky of Mine” is enough to make it a prescient-feeling footnote in the storied history of Swedish retroism, let alone the brooding-into-surging, organ-laced “Into the Sun,” which if it was issued by a new band this week would be an excuse unto itself for Bandcamp Friday. Wrapped in the shuffling title-track at the start and the harmonized, patiently-drawn “Mother Nature Mind” at the end, Universal Trial feels like a lesson in the essential role of producer Don Alsterberg (Graveyard, Blues Pills, Spiders, etc.) in defining the style as well as in what might’ve been if Solarius had put this out at the time.
This Friday, Aug. 6, marks the release date of Blood Feather, the debut four-song/25-minute EP from New York atmospheric heavybringers Guhts. At the core of the band is the pairing of vocalist Amber Burns and guitarist/synthesist Scott Prater, both also of the atmospheric sludge/post-metal outfit Witchkiss. As Burns explains it in the interview below, Prater was writing music for Witchkiss and began to embark on a separate project during pandemic lockdown last year. When she came aboard — at her insistence, again, to hear her tell the story — the roots of Guhts were set, and though she also drums in their “main outfit,” Blood Feather‘s programmed drumming allows for the exploration of new melodic ideas and textures without having to essentially be in two places at once in terms of headspace.
The four songs included on the EP — “Eyes Open,” “Handless Maiden,” “The Mirror” and 10-minute closer “The Forest” — are rounded out by the guitar/synth of Dan Shaneyfelt and the bass of Jesse Van Note, both of Asheville, North Carolina’s Black Mountain Hunger (the latter also plays in Bask), and like many newcomer outfits in 2021, Guhts seem to have emerged as a result of reaching out in new ways during a time when reaching out via live performance was an impossibility. Not gonna say I haven’t been there. Like many, Guhts, and Burns as lyricist and vocalist — the one putting words and melodies to the instrumental processions — seems to have used the opportunity to exorcise ideas and perhaps some of the existentialist tension that living through the last year-plus has wrought. Who are we when we’re denied crucial parts of who we think we are? Where to go from there.
I’m not sure what genre you’d put Guhts in on Blood Feather aside from a catchall word like “heavy,” which the EP most certainly is. There are shades of ambient doom and post-heavy rock in the intertwining keys and guitars, and certainly plenty of heft bearing down in the material, but that’s paired with an ethereality of purpose as well that, should Guhts continue to develop alongside Witchkiss, already feels like a direction of its own worth a deeper dive. In the meantime, this is a debut EP that listens an awful lot like a debut album, and I was glad to have the chance to talk to Burns about it.
Please enjoy:
Guhts Interview with Amber Burns, July 29, 2021
Guhts’ debut EP, Blood Feather, is out Aug. 6 and will be available direct from the band. More info at the links.
