My digipak version is almost certainly a bootleg. I don’t even know if Sons of Kyuss, the self-released 29-minute April 1990 self-titled offering from the band who would become Kyuss, has ever had an official CD release. And fair enough. It’s not Sons of Kyuss‘ 1989 demo in terms of roughness, but it’s not far off. It was recorded by kids in the Californian desert 35 years ago. Yes, it’s pretty raw.

There were only 500 copies manufactured of the private press LP and the band, which at the time was comprised of vocalist John Garcia, guitarist Josh Homme, bassist Chris Cockrell and drummer Brant Bjork, were still a couple years off from being paired with Masters of Reality‘s Chris Goss as producer, which would prove instrumental in shaping their sound. Sons of Kyuss, produced by Catherine Enny and Ron Krown, mixed by Michael Mikulka and mastered… at some point, probably… finds them at a nascent point in that process, and even a song like “Deadly Kiss” — which would show up a year later on what’s technically Kyuss‘ debut album, Wretch — is strikingly metal in how it hits.

Part of that is the era, of course. Sons of Kyuss wasn’t just before ‘desert rock’ was a genre; it was before grunge broke. Yet, to listen to “Deadly Kiss” and hear the Metallica influence and the swing and Garcia croon in “Window of Souls” that reminds of earliest Danzig, it both is and isn’t metal. There’s crunch to it for sure. Inevitably. It’s there amid the scuzzy swing of “King” and in the rush of “Isolation Desolation,” in the C.O.C. chug of “Love Has Passed Me By” and the motoring finish “Katzenjammer,” and so on. A big part of what Sons of Kyuss has for listeners three and a half decades after its release is crunch. It’s like Cheez Doodles, tonally speaking.

But it’s not metal. And if you had your ear to the ground circa 1990 and were aware because you read cool-kid magazines or had cool-kid friends of what was taking shape in Seattle, this wasn’t that either. Metal is part of it, but there’s too much punk in “Isolation Desolation” and too much groove elsewhere to be metal. And grunge shares a punk influence, but this isn’t either of those. So what the hell is it if “Black Widow” is layering solos Iommi-style and the shove of “Love Has Passed Me By” is so tense while “Happy Birthday” is so damn casual about the whole thing, even when the tempo picks up? Well, in math, if you divide zero by zero, you get something that can’t exist. You get “undefined.”

And whatever else it is — riff-heavy in a way that could appeal to Trouble fans, but younger and with more attitude — I think most of all, the ‘Sons of Kyuss sound’ or really just the ‘Kyuss sound,’ since most of their impact would of course come after the name change, is exactly that: undefined. Maybe the members of the band knew what they were into, but they didn’t yet know who they were as players in a way they were soon enough to discover. For those who would dig into Sons of Kyuss in an attempt to discover the roots of the band who most singularly shaped and continue to shape desert rock, it’s not one of those cases where the band showed up on day one and had a fully-formed idea of what they wanted to do. This was kids making noise.

Turned out, though, to be really special noise. With songwriting from Bjork and Homme, the roots of what Kyuss would become can be heard on Sons of Kyuss, and not just in the tracks that made it to Wretch. The way the tempo changes in “Window of Souls” from its languid roll to the shove of the midsection feels prescient, and though its intro and solo come across like glam metal, “Happy Birthday” ultimately incorporates these ideas with an organic-feeling fuckall that would prove to be an essential facet of their persona as a band. In the ’90s soon to unfold, it was called “slacker.” Nowadays it would almost certainly be a diagnosis of one sort or another.

Taken on its own merits, Sons of Kyuss isn’t where the Kyuss legacy comes from. When people talk about the band’s influence, they may have been playing the parties and small shows at this point that helped set the scene around Palm Springs/Palm Desert in motion at this point, but Sons of Kyuss isn’t what they’re talking about when they talk about what Kyuss did or who they were, and though I’m sure somewhere on the internet there exists the guy who prefers this era of the band to ‘all others’ — which of course assumes multiple nuanced eras for an act whose career lasted, generously, seven years; eras like The Beatles and Taylor Swift have only not like them because they’re too popular — that guy is in a contrarian minority with which he should be well familiar by now, and if you were a new listener taking on Kyuss for the first time, of their albums, Sons of Kyuss is precisely the last place I’d tell you to start. Yes, I’d send you to the greatest hits compilation before this. Just to give you some sense of scale.

That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s just undefined. Most of the context for appreciating what Kyuss accomplished during their run came after they were done, whether it was as an origin point for Queens of the Stone Age and the solo careers of Garcia, Bjork, or subsequent bassists Nick Oliveri and Scott Reeder, or the sundry projects they’ve done together along the way, outfits like Vista Chino and Stöner and whatever might be next because surely something is. Sons of Kyuss was already its own thing musically, and the sense of craft the band would bring to that over the next five years helped create a genre and is an influence that’s still being felt today. Even if its primary appeal is academic, Sons of Kyuss is essential as the outset for one of underground rock and roll’s greatest legacies.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

Uh, Halloween sucked. I knew it would and it did. But it sucked and then it was over, so at least I can say it ended and I’m not in some at-some-kid’s-house-with-a-bunch-of-parents, stand-around-and-can-we-leave-yet thing for eternity, which if I believed in hell would surely be my vision of it, The Patient Mrs. off in the basement chasing down The Pecan for eternity while people around me talk about perfectly reasonable things like their jobs and the addition they just put on the house and so on. Having neither personality nor gab enough to cover for it, I slink. I try to make myself small which never works. I just want to hide all the time.

I have Hungarian in half an hour. I didn’t write as much as I would’ve liked to this week. The Pecan was off from school on Tuesday, Thursday and today, so that’s where my time went, but I don’t have as much time as I want these days generally, so it’s a deeper complaint. I wish I had more time to write. I also wish I had more energy and more stuff I was super-into and like $100,000 a month and an EU passport and and and and.

Alas.

Four-day weekend is a lot, but we do alright. I wrote when I could, like now, after wakeup, before Hungarian. I’ve started slating stuff for another Quarterly Review, but at the same time, I’ve gotten to write a couple longer-form reviews not attached to premieres and I’m glad about that too. Someday when I’m ‘retired’ that’s what I’ll do. Because I don’t know that I’ll ever actually be able to keep my opinions to myself at this point.

Okay, so my lesson is in nine minutes. No idea what we’re doing today thereafter. The Patient Mrs.’ mother’s six-month-old corgi puppy has been with us since Wednesday and if you don’t know how long a Wednesday-to-Friday can be, I’d be perfectly happy to introduce you to the dog in question. If you don’t know corgis, they’re very conversational. They chatter, in addition to the piercing bark, and you can go back and forth and talk to them and get an answer. You grumble at the corgi, the corgi grumbles at you. It is reciprocal in a way a lot of dogs can’t be, and there’s a real appeal to that, but hell it’s a lot of barking too.

The other thing I’ll say is that I like Carwen, the dog in question, but she’s way more of a puppy-puppy than Tilly was, and that makes me appreciate how easy we had it with Tilly. Carwen reminds me of Dio in her chaotic-puppy-energy-don’t-know-where-to-put-it-so-put-it-everywhere-hey-a-shoe-it-fits-in-my-mouth-that’s-amazing stage, which I’ll be perfectly honest and tell you I’d largely forgotten. Tilly slept. Carwen pauses. It’s a different kind of energy and when it’s over, to be fair, you get a different kind of dog. Carwen has been as good a houseguest as a puppy could be while also being a puppy. She hasn’t pooped in the house, which is a big one for me.

And she only has to make it through tomorrow in that regard, so barring disaster — and by disaster I mean the dog shitting on the floor — we’ll be okay. I need to jump off and do class, so I’ll just say I hope you have a great and safe weekend. The world is crazy and so fucked in so many ways. If you can find a way to catch your breath, do it. You never know when the next chance will or won’t come.

I don’t have much planned for next week. Got a couple reviews I want to catch up on, one I want to write for Papir, but we’ll see how it goes. Either way, thanks again for reading. Back on Monday.

FRM.

The Obelisk Collective on Facebook

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch