[Click play above to stream the premiere of Weeed’s ‘Sun Song’ from Do You Fall? LP. Album is available now to order on LP, CD and tape through Halfshell Records and Six Tonnes de Chair Records.]

Oregonian riffers, jammers and all around weirdos Weeed make a departure with their seventh full-length, Do You Fall?, but that’s pretty consistent. Everything they do is a departure. Mostly for the listener in terms of the Portland five-piece taking you from the place you are to the place they want you to be. They’ve done this through an array of heavy styles over the course of the last however long, relying on an unflinchingly organic underpinning since their days of blowout noise adventures like “Stoned in the Dungeon” from 2013’s Garden of Weeeden debut long-player (recorded in 2008), and transposing that over increasingly progressive and spacious fare on recent outings like 2018’s four-songer This, which could stand a CD reissue, and 2019’s You Are the Sky (review here), while still keeping an experimentalist, sometimes playful edge.

Do You Fall? builds on some of the impulses shown within You Are the Sky in suitably natural fashion. Enough to make one wonder if the sky is falling. And it’s worth noting that Dylan White, who engineered Do You Fall? and mixed alongside the band (Mikey Young mastered), also worked on You Are the Sky. The context, however, has shifted from one release to the next, and though songs like “Anicha” or the later march-groover “Sun Song” have their howls and stretches of heft, which is not to mention the divergence that the 10-minute “Reflection” makes into wailing electrified drone guitar before its final moment brings the band around to repetitions of “We shall reflect…” before they finally reveal “…the creative energy of the sun” in the last line and subsequently move into “Sun Song.”

This record — laced with vocal harmonies from guitarists Gabriel Seaver (acoustic and electric, also lyrics and the percussive qraqeb) and Mitch Fosnaugh (electric, also flute, slide guitar) — is like that all over, the nine tracks flowing and tying together in subtle ways throughout a wholly immersive 48-minute span, that wakes up in jazz-haphazard fashion on “Ontological Register” with the drums of John Goodhue and Evan Franz (both also tambourine, the latter also cover art) more acting out along with the hear-the-pick-on-the-string guitar strums than keeping time before the either looped or looped sounding acoustic foundation of ‘Moment to Moment” takes hold and reveals the hypnosis that is central to Weeed‘s mission here.

The key lines arrive in the 13-minute, multi-movement “Rhythm on the Ground,” teased also at the very end of “Moment to Moment”: “Give your body to the trance/Give your mind up to the dance.”

That is the ethic by which Do You Fall?, and the band — rounded out here by Ian Hartley, who adds clave, congas, shaker and cabasa for further percussion presence — abide, and from the way the waves pick up in “Moment to Moment” and the guitar enters over them, it’s abundantly clear that Weeed are working internally as well as externally. That is, it’s the trance they’re seeking as well as conveying to their audience. Vocals are gentle but richly melodic throughout the album’s entirety, but the pieces that comprise the whole aren’t necessarily reliant on voice to carry their message — though the lyrics do offer clarity as noted with “Rhythm on the Ground” above.

That song follows “Moment to Moment” and is a purposeful landmark complemented later by “Reflection,” these two extended tracks pushing deeper into the immersion so intentional on the part of the band. Percussion fades in at the outset of “Rhythm on the Ground,” a brief introduction that gives way to acoustic guitar, a verse, echoing flute, double-drums, a pilgrimage march, winding jam, electric solo increasing in energy, a build, a cut back to quiet, “Give your body to the trance/Give your mind up to the dance,” a gradual resurgence, percussion in and out again, a mantra-esque urging to “dissolve,” cymbal washes to do that, and an end on “Give your mind up…” before “Anicha” arrives to keep the momentum rolling.

It’s an outright gorgeous procession, and shorter pieces like “Anicha,” the duly-barefoot-sounding acoustic instrumental “Something About Having Your Feet in the River” (listed with all-lowercase stylization on the actual album), “Sun Song” and “Path to Dhamma Kuñja” — the latter named for a meditation center in Onalaska, Washington — offer various residualities to it, as well as to “Reflection,” which comes together around a more prog rock vibe in general, but showcases no less breadth for that. Likewise, “Something About Having Your Feet in the River” seems to answer “Ontological Register” in purpose — maybe opening side B, I don’t know — and the Eastern-tinged inflection of electric guitar in “Path to Dhamma Kuñja” seems to resolve the repetitions of “Anicha” even as it expands on them and heads toward the concluding reprise of “Rhythm on the Ground Pt. 3,” which brings back those essential lines that Weeed seem to have kept at their core all the while.

“Part 3,” it should be said, is not actually the end of “Rhythm on the Ground,” but a selected three-minute snippet of it that lets Do You Fall? conclude at a moment of strumming guitar and flute that feels like it could just as easily take flight as cut to silence in the way it does. This too is an example of the band’s effective world-building here, the manner in which everything they present unfolds not quite as a single song or a single idea, but as an entirety, given a direction but loose in that to find its own way there. Psychedelia, freak folk, acid prog neo-Zendik this or that, whatever stylistic tags one might want to foist on it, Do You Fall? exists within and without these things, finding a wavelength in its own cosmos and residing there peacefully but not at all still. Is the sky falling? Probably, yeah. Do you fall? Sometimes. But maybe for a few minutes that can be alright too. It can all be part of it. Ether and sunshine. It doesn’t have to make sense just to be, right? That’d be okay, right? Just for a few minutes?

Weeed, Do You Fall? (2021)

Weeed on Facebook

Weeed on Instagram

Weeed on Bandcamp

Weeed store

Halfshell Records on Facebook

Halfshell Records on Instagram

Halfshell Records on Bandcamp

Six Tonnes de Chair Records on Facebook

Six Tonnes de Chair Records on Instagram

Six Tonnes de Chair Records on Bandcamp

There’s a kind of awakening sensation as the guitars hum and howl their way into the suitably titled leadoff track “Opening” on You are the Sky, setting an immediately patient and mild tone across a serene build for six and a half minutes. It’s the sort of move a band might make on a 70-minute album, but the fact that WEEED‘s sixth long-player (released through Halfshell Records) runs a manageable six tracks and 44 minutes and they dedicate six of those to the instrumental introduction demonstrates plainly how much of a priority they’re placing on mood and atmosphere. It is a careful, but natural sound they amass, and the songs that unfold are rich in their variety of arrangement and vibe. The Portland, Oregon-based four/five-piece of guitarist/vocalist Mitchell Fosnaugh, bassist/vocalist Gabriel Seaver and drummers/percussionists John Goodhue and Evan Franz (also synth and piano, respectively) employ Ian Hartley on hand percussion throughout, and along with other synth and vocoder from Fosnaugh and various effects from Seaver, there develops a fluidity between the songs that becomes essential to the overall affect of the record.

It is a deeply organic sound, with shimmering guitar and naturally flowing rhythms, and it’s lent all the more breadth through the percussion and the forward vocal melodies when they apply, almost Americana in style, but not in a way as to make it seem like a put-on, like all of a sudden Fosnaugh or Seaver get in front of a microphone and become cowboys. Far from it, but the vocals do a fair amount of work in complementing the naturalism of the instrumentation surrounding, and as “Opening” gives way to “I See You” and the cymbal washes and chasing, winding guitars of “Where Did You Go?,” leading to a welcome percussion jam at the end, there’s nothing done to pull the listener out of the space that the band has created. It’s immersive, but not through hypnotic repetition. Instead, WEEED simply — or, not simply — present their shifts and changes in a smooth, natural way, and they bring the audience with them wherever they want to go.

Until they don’t, and that’s a special moment too. You are the Sky doesn’t have a centerpiece as such — six tracks means no place for one — but “Open Door” is close enough, and after the rhythmic glee that tops “Where Did You Go?” finishes, it’s a stark turn to the electrified pulsations and vocoder speech repeating the title line that shows not only how far WEEED‘s experimental sensibility is willing to go on this outing, but how much they’re willing to make it a focal point. On a tape or LP, this would be the end of side A, but even listening in a linear format (CD, digital), the effect is striking. There are still guitar lines woven throughout, but they’re a part of a broader ambient moment, as is the hand percussion that emerges. It’s relatively quick at 4:19 — the shortest piece on You are the Sky and certainly less ranging than either “Caramelized” or the closing title-track that follow and both top 10 minutes long — but it’s a crucial moment nonetheless in what it brings to to the album as a whole.

WEEED have put out now-six albums since 2013, and this is hardly the first experimental tendency they’ve showcased, but true enough to its title, “Open Door” throws out any rulebook by which the band might otherwise have been playing and engages the listener on an entirely different level, so that it’s not just about laid back flow and languid jamming, but this darker take on American krautrock that leads the way into the “closing duo” that consumes nearly half the record’s runtime. It’s almost as if You are the Sky is two mini-albums put together and “Open Door” is a transitional moment between them, but the truth is it’s a standout from any other modus employed elsewhere in these tracks, and especially with where it’s placed among them, that’s very clearly intentional. If it was first or last, you’d almost be able to write it off and say, “Oh, that’s the intro,” etc., but as it is, WEEED put the emphasis on that expansion of palette, and it makes You are the Sky an even more encompassing listen.

Further, it’s worth noting that the shift back toward guitar-based fare is no less smoothly done than, say, the turn from “I See You” to “Where Did You Go?,” and as they unfold a progressive heavy psychedelic blues throughout, “Caramelized,” finding room for scale work on guitar and highlight basslines as well as harmonica in the second half, there’s an underlying urgency of rhythm that not only grounds the exploration, but makes it an exciting and enticing trip. The vocal melodies hold sway and provide a human presence early where “Caramelized” might otherwise lose its way into the jam, but they get there anyhow, and seem happy to go, guitar stepping back in favor of harmonica while the drums hold steady beneath. They build back up into a verse from there and noodle out rather than launch into a crescendo, but the journey is the thing, and it’s a pleasure. “You are the Sky” follows introducing its title line quickly ahead of an intricate bounce that opens to an effectively punctuated groove and a bit of space rock push that seems to grow more distant as the song moves toward its midpoint.

Soon enough, subdued guitar takes hold, the vocals step back into the space created, and everything — everything — calms way down. It’s temporary, but dynamic. A guitar solo spikes the energy, but dissipates and the sound of a wave brings in the next vocal line at the eight-minute mark that acts as the introduction for the final surge that will carry WEEED through the apex and out on a crashing finale. Well earned. You are the Sky feels very much based around the musical conversation happening between the players involved, but neither does it exclude the listener from that as so much material that might otherwise be tagged “progressive” can do. That’s a risk to take, but six albums later, WEEED either consciously know or have an innate sense of what they want to do in terms of songwriting, and that comes across in the realization and structure of the album. It’s a particular kind of gorgeous, not about a lush wash of effects so much as the mindset it inspires and the payoff of those risks taken. Be at peace, if not necessarily peaceful.

WEEED on Thee Facebooks

WEEED on Bandcamp

Halfshell Records on Thee Facebooks

Halfshell Records on Bandcamp