Posted in Reviews on November 27th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Sula Bassana and Skyjoggers both took part in this year’s Dazed and Spaced Festival at Bar 227 in Hamburg, the former headlining the second night on April 27 and the latter playing earlier that same evening, having traveled from their Earthly home in Tampere, Finland, to play. The tracks — recorded by someone named Funcky — are pretty lo-fi, with Skyjoggers starting off side A in ground-torching fashion on “Step One: Breathe/Step Two: Levitate,” building momentum quickly with the lead cut from their 2023 three-songer EP, 37 Steps ’til Sunlight, released on vinyl alongside 2022’s I Am a Stone in Gagaria, the band detailing aurally their adventures on the planet of the same name as they hurtle through the cosmos with an FTL engine apparently powered by reverb, raw distortion mixed by Johannes Latva and mastered by Janne Hakanen, and sheer will.
As this split is my first encounter with the three-piece of guitarist Alexi Belle, bassist Juan Rico and drummer Gabo Sabor, I’ll admit my ignorance of Gagaria, the Kosmonoita or the uncharted solar system where their 2019 LP, Seasons of Uiu, reportedly took place. Nonetheless, the Finnish unit make a joyful racket out amid the void and the dark energy, and “Lightrunner” is careening and swirling alike, vocal echoes cutting through clearly, but buried in echo in classic space rock fashion. But Skyjoggers aren’t necessarily a classic space rock band. Their sound, and their apparent conceptualist ethic, certainly has roots in the style, but “Lightrunner” takes off on a more modern, funkier jam after it hits the halfway mark and before it realigns around the forward-directed, gleefully noisy thrust. It’s a blend that will make it easy for listeners coming into the split expecting a weirdness of character to get on board, but frankly, the ship is loaded and is gonna launch whether you’re on it or not.
The destination, here, for Skyjoggers is the floating “…For Outer Space,” which at nine and a half minutes is nearly as long as the first two songs put together and likewise represents a shift in style. Taken from 2018’s Journeymen full-length, where it’s preceded by “Set Sail…,” “…For Outer Space” initially leaves behind the tumult of “Step One: Breathe/Step Two: Levitate” and “Lightrunner” in favor of mellower cosmic blessings. They bring it up to a wall of noise efficiently enough, but the sense of purposeful meander, the feeling that it all might come crashing apart, remain consistent. It doesn’t, of course, or the set probably wouldn’t see public release at all, but “…For Outer Space” rides that line as it moves deeper into its second half with a this-is-why-it-closes-shows, big-no-bigger nod that, even in this live version so much about the energy the band are bringing to it from the stage still feels immersive.
One could hardly ask a more fitting lead-in for Sula Bassana. The long-running Kassel, Germany, solo-project of Dave “Sula Bassana” Schmidt — who not only is releasing the split through his Sulatron Records label (Echodelick and Cardinal Fuzz also have copies) and mixed his band’s portion (Eroc mastered), but is known for outfits like Electric Moon, Zone Six, Liquid Visions, the way underrated Weltraumstaunen, Moonseeds who released an album earlier this year, and so on — took on a full lineup in 2023. This is the first release I know of to feature it, and as they reinterpret and flesh out “We Will Make It” from Sula Bassana‘s 2022 album, Nostalgia (review here), Schmidt himself fleshing it out on organ and synth/Mellotron while guitarist Adrian Grod adds vocals and bassist Kristina Schmitz and drummer Franz Fesel conjure molten groove, the context feels appropriate.
“We Will Make It” feels more volatile with its shouts past the seven-minute mark, repeating the title line with due insistence, but indeed, the band get where they’re going, which is a quick receding before the harder-hitting finish. As a complement to Skyjoggers‘ closer, “We Will Make It” has moments of heavier kosmiche push, maybe even a bit of grunge in the riffing of guitarist Adrian Grod — which are a novelty on a Sula Bassana release in themselves — alongside Sula‘s Mellotron and declarative vocals, the linear groove of Franz Fesel and the corresponding low-end flow of Kristina Schmitz‘s bass. A full lineup is a turn for Sula Bassana to make, and the amalgam of different players obviously is a shift in dynamic for an outfit that used to just be one person, but “We Will Make It” does, in fact, make it. It makes it clear that a live performance such as one captured here, that the notion of expanding on past ideas and adventuring into new ground yet to be discovered, is the point.
Can’t argue as “We Will Make It” leaves a scorch mark halfway through the solar system and the analog sci-fi, vaguely-Eastern synth sets a backdrop for Grod‘s somehow cultish echoing spoken word intro to “Come With Me.” The destination isn’t clear — that is, I’m not sure where we’re going — but they cover a pretty broad swath in the 13 minutes of the split’s closing track; languid, fluid, druid. It’s not all wash as they dive back to the keys and vibemaking from whence they set out, but when the volume comes back around by about nine minutes in, they sound like they’re rending the fabric of spacetime. Gravity jam. The sense of reaching into the unknown is palpable, and even the residual noise after the drums make their final crash feels immersive. It’s not just that Sula Bassana have become a band, then. They’ve become this band.
A live release is a fascinating way to unveil that, and perhaps not what Schmidt and company originally had in mind for Sula Bassana‘s ‘debut’ as they’ve gotten going over the last year, but “We Will Make It” and, especially “Come With Me,” which is a new song, herald journeys to come. It’s strange to think of Skyjoggers as the more experienced band considering Sula Bassana‘s recently-reissued first album, Dreamer, came out in 2002, but the new lineup is fresh and sounds like it, which if it needs to be said is not a complaint. Psych-heads, Sula-worshipers, or anyone looking for a bit of alt-universe aural escape, here you go.
Posted in Reviews on January 12th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
We press on, until the end, though tired and long since out of adjectival alternatives to ‘heavy.’ The only way out is through, or so I’m told. Therefore, we go through.
Morale? Low. Brain, exhausted. The shit? Hit the fan like three days ago. The walls, existentially speaking, are a mess. Still, we go through.
Two more days to go. Thanks for reading.
Winter 2023 Quarterly Review #81-90:
Farflung, Like Drones in Honey
No question Farflung are space rock. It’s not up for debate. They are who they are and on their 10th full-length, Like Drones in Honey (on Sulatron, which suits both them and label), they remain Farflung. But whether it’s the sweet ending of the “Baile an Doire” or the fuzz riffing beneath the sneer of “King Fright” and the careening garage strum of “Earthmen Look Alike to Me,” the album offers a slew of reminders that as far out as Farflung get — and oh my goodness, they go — the long-running Los Angeles outfit were also there in the mid and late ’90s as heavy rock and, in California particularly, desert rock took shape. Of course, opener “Acid Drain” weaves itself into the fabric of the universe via effects blowout and impulse-engine chug, and after that finish in “Baile an Doire,” they keep the experimentalism going on the backwards/forwards piano/violin of “Touch of the Lemmings Kiss” and the whispers and underwater rhythm of closer “A Year in Japan,” but even in the middle of the pastoral “Tiny Cities Made of Broken Teeth” or in the second half of the drifting “Dludgemasterpoede,” they’re space and rock, and it’s worth not forgetting about the latter even as you blast off with weirdo rocket fuel. Like their genre overall, like Sulatron, Farflung are underrated. It is lucky that doesn’t slow their outbound trip in the slightest.
Whether you want to namedrop one or another Coltrane or the likes of Amon Düül or Magma or whoever else, the point is the same: Neptunian Maximalism are not making conventional music. Yeah, there’s rhythm, meter, even some melody, but the 66-minute run of the recorded-on-stage Finis Gloriae Mundi isn’t defined by songs so much as the pieces that make up its consuming entirety. As a group, the Belgians’ project isn’t to write songs to much as to manifest an expression of an idea; in this case, apparently, the end of the world. A given stretch might drone or shred, meditate in avant-jazz or move-move-move-baby in heavy kosmiche push, but as they make their way to the two-part culmination “The Conference of the Stars,” the sense of bringing-it-all-down is palpable, and so fair enough for their staying on theme and offering “Neptunian’s Raga Marwa” as a hint toward the cycle of ending and new beginnings, bright sitar rising out of low, droning, presented-as-empty space. For most, their extreme take on prog and psych will simply be too dug in, too far from the norm, and that’s okay. Neptunian Maximalism aren’t so much trying to be universal as to try to commune with the universe itself, wherever that might exist if it does at all. End of the world? Fine. Let it go. Another one will come along eventually.
Four years after their 2018 self-titled debut (review here), Denver heavy rock and rollers Near Dusk gather eight songs across and smooth-rolling, vinyl-minded 37 minutes for Through the Cosmic Fog, which takes its title from the seven-and-a-half-minute penultimate instrumental “Cosmic Fog,” a languid but not inactive jam that feels especially vital for the character it adds among the more straightforward songs earlier in the record — the rockers, as it were — that comprise side A: “The Way it Goes,” “Spliff ’em All,” and so on. “Cosmic Fog” isn’t side B’s only moment of departure, as the drumless guitar-exploration-into-acoustic “Roses of Durban” and the slower rolling finisher “Slab City” fill out the expansion set forth with the bluesy solo in the back end of “EMFD,” but the strength of craft they show on the first four songs isn’t to be discounted either for the fullness or the competence of their approach. The three-piece of Matthew Orloff, Jon Orloff and Kellen McInerney know where they’re coming from in West Coast-style heavy, not-quite-party, rock, and it’s the strength of the foundation they build early in the opening duo and “The Damned” and “Blood for Money,” that lets them reach outward late, allowing Through the Cosmic Fog to claim its space as a classically structured, immediately welcome heavy rock LP.
The 2023 self-titled debut EP from Portland, Oregon’s Simple Forms collects four prior singles issued over the course of 2021 and 2022 into one convenient package, and even if you’ve been keeping up with the trickle of material from the band that boasts members of YOB, (now) Hot Victory, Dark Castle and Norska, hearing the tracks right next to each other does change the context somewhat, as with the darker turn of “From Weathered Hand” after “Reaching for the Shadow” or the way that leadoff and “Together We Will Rest” seem to complement each other in the brightness of the forward guitar, a kind of Euro-style proggy noodling that reminds of The Devil’s Blood or something more goth, transposed onto a forward-pushing Pacific Northwestern crunch. The hints of black metal in the riffing of “The Void Beneath” highlight the point that this is just the start for guitarists Rob Shaffer and Dustin Rieseberg, bassist Aaron Rieseberg and grunge-informed frontman Jason Oswald (who also played drums and synth here), but already their sprawl is nuanced and directed toward individualism. I don’t know what their plans might be moving forward, but if the single releases didn’t highlight their potential, certainly the four songs all together does. A 19-minute sampler of what might be, if it will be.
Probably safe to call Lybica a side-project for Justin Foley, since it seems unlikely to start taking priority over his position as drummer in metalcore mainstays Killswitch Engage anytime soon, but the band’s self-titled debut offers a glimpse of some other influences at work. Instrumental in its entirety, it comes together with Foley leading on guitar joined by bassist Doug French and guitarist Joey Johnson (both of Gravel Kings) and drummer Chris Lane (A Brilliant Lie), and sure, there’s some pretty flourish of guitar, and some heavier, more direct chugging crunch — “Palatial” in another context might have a breakdown riff, and the subsequent “Oktavist” is more directly instru-metal — but even in the weighted stretch at the culmination of “Ferment,” and in the tense impression at the beginning of seven-minute closer “Charyou,” the vibe is more in line with Russian Circles than Foley‘s main outfit, and clearly that’s the point. “Ascend” and “Resonance” open the album with pointedly non-metallic atmospheres, and they, along with the harder-hitting cuts and “Manifest,” “Voltaic” and “Charyou,” which bring the two sides together, set up a dynamic that, while familiar in this initial stage, is both satisfying in impact and more aggressive moments while immersive in scope.
Just as their moniker might belong to some lost-classic heavy band from 1972 one happens upon in a record store, buys for the cover, and subsequently loves, so too does Naples four-piece Bird tap into proto-metal vibes on their latest single Walpurgis. And that’s not happenstance. While their production isn’t quite tipped over into pure vintage-ism, it’s definitely organic, and they’ve covered the likes of Rainbow, Uriah Heep and Deep Purple, so while “Walpurgis” itself leans toward doom in its catchy and utterly reasonable three-plus minutes, there’s no doubt Bird know where their nest is, stylistically speaking. Given a boost through release by Olde Magick Records, the single-songer follows 2021’s The Great Beast From the Sea EP, which proffered a bit more burl and modern style in its overarching sound, so it could be that as they continue to grow they’re learning a bit more patience in their approach, as “Walpurgis” is nestled right into a tempo that, while active enough to still swing, is languid just the same in its flow, with maybe a bit more rawness in the separation of the guitar, bass, drums and organ. Most importantly, it suits the song, and piques curiosity as to where Bird go next, as any decent single should.
Without getting into which of them does what where — because they switch, and it’s complicated, and there’s only so much room — the core of the sound for Melbourne-based four-piece Pseudo Mind Hive is in has-chops boogie rock, but that’s a beginning descriptor, not an end. It doesn’t account for the psych-surf-fuzz in two-minute instrumental opener “Hot Tooth” on their Eclectica EP, for example, or the what-if-Queens–of–the–Stone–Age-kept-going-like-the-self-titled “Moon Boots” that follows on the five-song offering. “You Can Run” has a fuzzy shuffle and up-strummed chug that earns the accompanying handclaps like Joan Jett, while “This Old Tree” dares past the four-minute mark with its scorching jive, born out of a smoother start-stop fuzz verse with its own sort of guitar antics, and “Coming Down,” well, doesn’t at first, but does give way soon enough to a dreamier psychedelic cast and some highlight vocal melody before it finds itself awake again and already running, tense in its builds and overlaid high-register noises, which stand out even in the long fade. Blink and you’ll miss it as it dashes by, all momentum and high-grade songcraft, but that’s alright. It does fine on repeat listens as well, which obviously is no coincidence.
On. Slaught. Call it atmospheric sludge, call it post-metal; I sincerely doubt Philadelphia’s Oktas give a shit. Across the four songs and 36 minutes of the two-bass-no-guitar band’s utterly bludgeoning debut album, The Finite and the Infinite, the band — bassist/vocalist Bob Stokes, cellist Agnes Kline, bassist Carl Whitlock and drummer Ron Macauley — capture a severity of tone and a range that goes beyond loud/quiet tradeoffs into the making of songs that are memorable while not necessarily delivering hooks in the traditional verse/chorus manner. It’s the cello that stands out as opener “Collateral Damage” plods to its finish — though Macauley‘s drum fills deserve special mention — and even as “Epicyon” introduces the first of the record’s softer breaks, it is contrasted in doing so by a section of outright death metal onslaught so that the two play back and forth before eventually joining forces in another dynamic and crushing finish. Tempo kick is what’s missing thus far and “Light in the Suffering” hits that mark immediately, finding blackened tremolo on the other side of its own extended cello-led subdued stretch, coming to a head just before the ending so that finale “A Long, Dreamless Sleep” can start with its Carl Sagan sample about how horrible humans are (correct), and build gracefully over the next few minutes before saying screw it and diving headfirst into cyclical chug and sprinting extremity. Somebody sign this band and press this shit up already.
This is a rock and roll band, make no mistake. Berlin’s Scream of the Butterfly draw across decades of influence, from ’60s pop and ’70s heavy to ’90s grunge, ’00s garage and whatever the hell’s been going on the last 10-plus years to craft an amalgamated sound that is cohesive thanks largely to the tightness of their performances — energetic, sure, but they make it sound easy — the overarching gotta-get-up urgency of their push and groove, and the current of craft that draws it all together. They’ve got 10 songs on The Grand Stadium, which is their third album, and they all seem to be trying to outdo each other in terms of hooks, electricity, vibe, and so on. Even the acoustic-led atmosphere-piece “Now, Then and Nowhere” leaves a mark, to say nothing of the much, much heavier “Sweet Adeleine” or the sunshine in “Dead End Land” or the bluesy shove of “Ain’t No Living.” Imagine time as a malleable thing and some understanding of how the two-minute “Say Your Name to Me” can exist in different styles simultaneously, be classic and forward thinking, spare and spacious. And I don’t know what’s going on with all the people talking in “Hallway of a Thousand Eyes,” but Scream of the Butterfly make it easy to dig anyway and remind throughout of the power that can be realized when a band is both genuinely multifaceted and talented songwriters. Scary stuff, that.
Based in Kassel with lyrics in their native German, Holz are vocalist/guitarist Leonard Riegel, bassist Maik Blümke and drummer Martin Nickel, and on their self-titled debut (released by Tonzonen), they tear with vigor into a style that’s somewhere between noise rock, stoner heavy and rawer punk, finding a niche for themselves that feels barebones with the dry — that is, little to no effects — vocal treatment and a drum sound that cuts through the fuzz that surrounds on early highlight “Bitte” and the later, more noisily swaying “Nichts.” The eight-minute “Garten” is a departure from its surroundings with a lengthy fuzz jam in its midsection — not as mellow as you’re thinking; the drums remain restless and hint toward the resurgence to come — while “Zerstören” reignites desert rock riffing to its own in-the-rehearsal-room-feeling purposes. Intensity is an asset there and at various other points throughout, but there’s more to Holz than ‘go’ as the rolling “50 Meilen Geradeaus” and the swing-happy, bit-o’-melody-and-all “Dämon” showcase, but when they want to, they’re ready and willing to stomp into heavier tones, impatient thrust, or as in the penultimate “Warten,” a little bit of both. Not everybody goes on a rampage their first time out, but it definitely suits Holz to wreck shit in such a fashion.
