Posted in Whathaveyou on June 12th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
I like this band. In another timeline somewhere 20-25 years ago, one might’ve heard a band like this, signed them to Atlantic or some other major label with money to spend and a residual sense of rock music as something worth making a new investment in, and set them touring for the next decade or three, just to see what sticks. I liked the band’s 2023 self-titled debut (review here) and the follow-up 2024 EP, East Side (review here), and the upcoming single “Stranger” keeps the thread going by showcasing inheritances from grunge without being beholden to them, finding a youthful brooding that’s aware enough of its own craft not to get lost in navelgazing. Unlike fucking everybody, it sometimes feels like.
In case you, like me, have no idea when June 20 is, it’s next Friday. My suggestion is you just follow Laurel Canyon on Bandcamp/wherever and then you won’t miss it, because no, I’m not so full of myself as to think you’ll remember some song from a news post here more than a week earlier just on my say-so. Set an alarm or some such. Write it in pen on your wall calendar. Mine still says May, it turns out; though in my defense the baby-goats-calendar picture for May was extra adorable.
The mind wanders. The PR wire, however, stays on task with vigilence:
Noise punk outfit Laurel Canyon announce new single ‘Stranger’ out 20th June via Agitated Records
Recorded live to tape in London after an early morning drive from Liverpool during their first European tour, the track was laid down in just a few takes with Mercury Prize-winning producer Shuta Shinoda. What you will hear is exactly what echoed through sixteen sweaty clubs across Europe, raw and unfiltered. “Stranger” delves into themes of identity and transformation, propelled by explosive, fuzzed-out guitars, pounding drums, a hypnotic bassline and pristine vocal harmonies.
The single will be available on all major streaming platforms.
Laurel Canyon’s three-track 2024 EP East Side was the follow up to their self-titled debut album. The songs – ‘East Side’, ‘Garden of Eden’, and ‘Untitled’ – expand on their feedback-laden, amphetamine-fueled garage rock sound with sharper focus and tenacity. The cover art (by photographer Alec Ilstrup) shows a stark found object style photograph of Laurel Canyon-branded naloxone spray – which is used to reverse or reduce the effects of opioids – representing the music within as a shot-to-the-heart of rock ‘n’ roll.
Good morning and heavy riffs. Today is day 7 of the Quarterly Review. It’s already been a lot, but there are still 30 more releases to cover over the next three days, so I assure you at some point I’ll have that nervous breakdown that’s been ticking away in the back of my brain. A blast as always, which I mean both sincerely and sarcastically, somehow.
But when we’re done, 100 releases will have been covered, and I get a medal sent to me whenever that happens from the UN’s Stoner Rock Commission on Such Things, so I’ll look forward to that. In the meantime, we’re off.
Quarterly Review #61-70:
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Ufomammut, Hidden
Italian cosmic doomers Ufomammut celebrate their 25th anniversary in 2024, and as they always have, they do so by looking and moving forward. Hidden is the 10th LP in their catalog, the second to feature drummer Levre — who made his debut on 2022’s Fenice (review here) alongside bassist/vocalist Urlo and guitarist Poia (both also keyboards) — and it was preceded by last year’s Crookhead EP (review here), the 10-minute title-track of which is repurposed as the opener here. A singular, signature blend of heft and synth-based atmospherics, Ufomammut roll fluidly through the six-tracker check-in, and follow on from Fenice in sounding refreshed while digging into their core stylistic purposes. “Spidher” brings extra tonal crush around its open verse, and “Mausoleum” has plenty of that as well but is less condensed and hypnotic in its atmospheric midsection, Ufomammut paying attention to details while basking in an overarching largesse. The penultimate “Leeched” was the lead single for good reason, and the four-minute “Soulost” closes with a particularly psychedelic exploration of texture and drone with the drums keeping it moving. 25 years later and there’s still new things to discover. I hear the universe is like that.
Considering some of the places Dana Schechter has taken Insect Ark over the project’s to-date duration, most of Raw Blood Singing might at times feel daringly straightforward, but that’s hardly a detriment to the material itself. Songs like “The Hands” bring together rhythmic tension and melodic breadth, as soundscapes of drone, low end chug and the drumming of Tim Wyskida (also Khanate, Blind Idiot God) cast a morose, encompassing atmospheric vision. And rest assured, while “The Frozen Lake” lumbers through its seven minutes of depressive post-sludge — shades of The Book of Knots at their heaviest, but still darker — and “Psychological Jackal” grows likewise harsher and horrific, the experimentalist urge continues to resonate; the difference is it’s being set to serve the purposes of the songs themselves in “Youth Body Swayed” or “Cleaven Hearted,” which slogs like death-doom with a strum cutting through to replace vocals, whereas the outro “Ascension” highlights the noise on its own. It is a bleak, consuming course presented over Raw Blood Singing‘s 45 minutes, but there’s solace in the catharsis as well.
Laced through with harmonica and organic vibes, Netherlands-based five-piece Heath make their full-length debut with the four extended tracks of Isaak’s Marble, reveling in duly expansive jams keyed for vibrancy and a live sound. They are somewhat the band-between as regards microgenres, with a style that can be traced on the opening title-cut to heavy ’70s funk-boogie-via-prog-rock, and the harmonica plays a role there before spacing out with echo over top of the psychedelia beginning of “Wondrous Wetlands.” The wetlands in question, incidentally, might just be the guitar tone, but that haze clears a bit as the band saunters into a light shuffle jam before the harder-hitting build into a crescendo that sounds unhinged but is in fact quite under control as it turns back to a softshoe-ready groove with organ, keys, harmonica, guitar all twisting around with the bass and drums. Sitar and vocal harmonies give the shorter-at-six-minutes “Strawberry Girl” a ’60s psych-pop sunshine, but the undercurrent is consistent with the two songs before as Heath highlight the shroomier side of their pastoralism, ahead of side B capper “Valley of the Sun” transitioning out of that momentary soundscape with clear-eyed guitar and flute leading to an angular progression grounded by snare and a guitar solo after the verse that leads the shift into the final build. They’re not done, of course, as they bring it all to a rousing end and some leftover noise; subdued in the actual-departing, but still resonant in momentum and potential. These guys might just be onto something.
The Cosmic Dead, releasing through Heavy Psych Sounds, count Infinite Peaks as their ninth LP since 2011. I’ll take them at their word since between live offerings, splits, collections and whatnot, it’s hard sometimes to know what’s an album. Similarly, when immersed in the 23-minute cosmic sprawl of “Navigator #9,” it can become difficult to understand where you stop and the universe around you begins. Rising quickly to a steady, organ-inclusive roll, the Glaswegian instrumental psilocybinists conjure depth like few of their jam-prone ilk and remain entrancing as “Navigator #9” shifts into its more languid, less-consuming middle movement ahead of the resurgent finish. Over on side B, “Space Mountain” (20:02) is a bit more drastic in the ends it swaps between — a little noisier and faster up front, followed by a zazzy-jazzy push with fiddle and effects giving over to start-stop bass and due urgency in the drums complemented by fuzz like they just got in a room and this happened before the skronky apex and unearthly comedown resolve in a final stretch of drone. Ninth record or 15th, whatever. Their mastery of interstellar heavy exploration is palpable regardless of time, place or circumstance. Infinite Peaks glimpses at that dimensional makeup.
Perhaps telegraphing some of their second long-player’s darker intentions in the cover art and the title Nyctophilia — a condition whereby you’re happier and more comfortable in darkness — if not the choice of Max Norman (Ozzy Osbourne, Death Angel, etc.) to produce, San Francisco’s The Watchers are nonetheless a heavy rock and roll band. What’s shifted in relation to their 2018 debut, Black Abyss (review here), is the angle of approach they take in getting there. What hasn’t changed is the strength of songwriting at their foundation or the hitting-all-their-marks professionalism of their execution, whether it’s Tim Narducci bringing a classic reach to the vocals of “Garden Tomb” or the precise muting in his and Jeremy Von Epp‘s guitars and Chris Lombardo‘s bass on “Haunt You When I’m Dead” and Nick Benigno‘s declarative kickdrum stomping through the shred of “They Have No God.” The material lands harder without giving up its capital-‘h’ Heavy, which is an accomplishment in itself, but The Watchers set a high standard last time out and Nyctophilia lives up to that while pursuing its own semi-divergent ends.
Leipzig’s Juke Cove follow a progressive course across eight songs and 44 minutes of Tempest, between nodding riffs of marked density and varying degrees of immediacy, whether it’s the might-just-turn-around-on-you “Hypnosis” early on or the shove with which the duly brief penultimate piece “Burst” takes off after the weighted crash of and ending stoner-rock janga-janga riff of “Glow” and precedes the also-massive “Xanadu” in the closing position, capping with a fuzzy solo because why not. From opener “The Path” into the bombast of “Hypnosis” and the look-what-we-can-make-riffs-do “Wait,” the three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Mateusz Pietrzela, bassist/vocalist Dima Ogorodnov and drummer Maxim Balobin mine aural individualism from familiar-enough genre elements, shaping material of character that benefits from the scope wrought in tone and production. Much to its credit, Tempest feels unforced in speaking to various sides of its persona, and no matter where a given song might go — the watery finish of “Wait” or the space-blues drift that emerges out of psych-leaning noise rock on “Confined,” for example — Juke Cove steer with care and heart alike and are all the more able to bring their audience with them as a result. Very cool, and no, I’m not calling them pricks when I say that.
A little more than a year out from their impressive self-titled debut LP (review here), Philly three-piece Laurel Canyon — guitarist/bassist/vocalist Nicholas Gillespie, guitarist/vocalist Serg Cereja, drummer Dylan DePice — offer the East Side three-songer to follow-up on the weighted proto-grunge vibes therein. “East Side” itself, at two and a half minutes, is a little more punk in that as it aligns for a forward push in the chorus between its swaggering verses, while “Garden of Eden” is more directly Nirvana-schooled in making its well-crafted melody sound like something that just tumbled out of somebody’s mouth, pure happenstance, and “Untitled” gets more aggressive in its second half, topping a momentary slowdown/nod with shouts before they let it fall apart at the end. This procession takes place in under 10 minutes and by the time you feel like you’ve got a handle on it, they’re done, which is probably how it should be. East Side isn’t Laurel Canyon‘s first short release, and they’re clearly comfortable in the format, bolstering the in-your-face-itude of their style with a get-in-and-get-out ethic correspondingly righteous in its rawness.
If you hadn’t yet come around to thinking of Poland among Europe’s prime underground hotspots, Tet offer their four-song/45-minute self-titled debut for your (re-)consideration. With its lyrics and titles in Polish, Tet draws on the modern heavy prog influence of Elder in some of the 12-minute opener/longest track (immediate points), “Srebro i antracyt,” but neither that nor “Dom w cieniu gruszy,” which follows, stays entirely in one place for the duration, and the lush melody that coincides with the unfolding of “Wiosna” is Tet‘s own in more than just language; that is to say, there’s more to distinguish them from their influences than the syllabic. Each inclusion adds complexity to the story their songs are telling, and as closer “Włóczykije” gradually moves from its dronescape by bringing in the drums unveiling the instrumentalist build already underway, Tet carve a niche for themselves in one of the continent’s most crowded scenes. I wonder if they’ve opened for Weedpecker. They could. Or Belzebong, for that matter. Either way, it will be worth looking out for how they expand on these ideas next time around.
Aidan Baker, Everything is Like Always Until it is Not
Aidan Baker, also of Nadja, aligns the eight pieces of what I think is still his newest outing — oh wait, nope; this came out in Feb. and in March he had an hour-long drone two-songer out; go figure/glad I checked — to represent the truism of the title Everything is Like Always Until it is Not, and arranges the tracks so that the earlier post-shoegaze in “Everything” or “Like” can be a preface for the more directly drone-based “It” “Is” later on. And yes, there are two songs called “Is.” Does it matter? Definitely not while Baker‘s evocations are actually being heard. Free-jazz drums — not generally known for a grounding effect — do some work in terms of giving all the float that surrounds them a terrestrial aspect, but if you know Baker‘s work either through his solo stuff, Nadja or sundry other collaborations, I probably don’t need to tell you that the 47 minutes of Everything is Like Always Until it is Not fall into the “not like always” category as a defining feature, whether it’s “Until” manifesting tonal heft in waves of static cut through by tom-to-snare-to-cymbal splashes or “Not” seeming unwilling to give itself over to its own flow. I imagine a certain restlessness is how Aidan Baker‘s music happens in the first place. You get smaller encapsulations of that here, if not more traditional accessibility.
Based in the arguable capitol of the Doom Capitol region — Frederick, Maryland — the three-piece Trap Ratt arrive in superbly raw style with the four-song/33-minute Tribus Rattus Mortuus, the last of which, aptly-titled “IV,” features Tim Otis (High Noon Kahuna, Admiral Browning, etc.), who also mixed and mastered, guesting on noise while Charlie Chaplin’s soliloquy from 1940’s The Dictator takes the place of the tortured barebones shouts that accompany the plod of 13-minute opener/longest track (immediate points) “The Sacred Skunk,” seemingly whenever they feel like it. That includes the chugging part before the feedback gets caustic near the song’s end, by the way. “Thieving From the Grieving” — which may or may not have been made up on the spot — repurposes Stooges-style riffing as the foundation for its own decay into noise, and if from anything I’ve said so far about the album you might expect “Take the Gun” to not be accordingly harsh, Trap Ratt have a word and eight minutes of disaffected exploration they’d like to share with you. It’s not every record you could say benefits aesthetically from being recorded live in the band’s rehearsal space, but yes, Tribus Rattus Mortuus most definitely does.
Philadelphia’s Laurel Canyon make their self-titled full-length debut on March 31 through Agitated Records. The narrative is murky — which fits, aesthetically, even though the band isn’t — but the 10-song/37-minute offering fuzz-buzzes with immediate swagger on well-placed opening cut “Drop Out,” tapping indie chic screwall with garage rock swing and heavy grunge impulse and a point of view in the vocals and wah-overload of guitarist/bassist Nick Gillespie and guitarist/vocalist Serg Cereja of persistently lacking the fucks that might otherwise be given.
It’s a hard line to walk, let alone have drummer Dylan DePice bash away under the throaty moans of “Madame Hit the Wire” — which may or may not be about prostitution; haven’t seen a lyric sheet, and whoever between Cereja and Gillespie is singing lead, there’s a heroic dose of drawl in the delivery; again, fitting — but Laurel Canyon, though they take their name from the Los Angeles epicenter of 1960s folk-rock/prog exploration, are way more Seattle circa 1989, and on “Drop Out” and side B’s two-minute in-room “Tangiers,” they’ve got the Steve Albini production to prove it, lest we forget dude tracked In Utero, while other songs were helmed by Bryce Goggin, whose massive discography includes work with The Lemonheads, Pavement, earlier and later Swans, among scores of others.
There’s a fair amount happening at any given time, but the will toward rawness is palpable. Don’t take that as indication that the arrangements are unconsidered, as throughout the record Laurel Canyon again and again dare to underscore that kind of fall-asleep-standing-up-or-am-I-nodding-out attitude with solidified (sub) pop structure and accessibility. Not an easy balance to strike, and the fact that “Eczema” brazenly taps “Come as You Are” creeper-verse vibes before its chorus explodes with more of a ’70s Detroit burst and “Tangiers” seems to translate the bassline of “Lithium” to guitar assures that the message gets through.
In 2021, the band issued two startup digital singles, “Two Times Emptiness” and “Enemy Lines,” both of which featured a style more born out of post-punk, but kick enough dirt on it and the shift between those songs and “Daddy’s Honey” — which was the lead track on early-2022’s Victim EP that featured Dylan Loccarini on bass and also featured “Eczema,” “Shove,” “Victim” and “Sade,” all included here, the latter closing — makes a kind of sense in the timeline. If they’re shy about anything, it’s the conscious choice that was inevitably behind the shift in approach, but the sort of full-volume post-Reagan hopelessness in the penultimate “Take Your Cut,” the jangle of guitar there when the distortion isn’t in its more consuming fullness, is the best argument in favor of itself, the trio coming across genuine in having arrived at grunge the way grunge arrived in the first place: punks too lazy or stoned to fit themselves in that genre’s rigid definition reveling in grit and the looking-around-for-the-first-time cynicism of a generation coming of age in an increasingly awful, dying world.
Does it matter that they were maybe-born when Kurt Cobain roamed the earth? Only if you’re an asshole. Relative youth — that is, pre-30 — is an asset across Laurel Canyon, freeing the band to speak to these influences while filling in the inevitable gaps with their own stylistic character, which, thankfully, they do, in the blowout jam of “Victim” and elsewhere. Of the 10 inclusions, “Madame Hit the Wire” and the probably-not-coincidentally-preceding “A Man About Town” and “Take Your Cut” seem to be the only ones not previously released, but the value of having it all in one place isn’t to be understated, even as the march through “Daddy’s Honey,” “Tangiers,” “Shove” and “Take Your Cut” feels all-in on loose-wrist three-chord strum, variously interpreted as it may be with “Shove” letting in a bit more sunlight while “Tangiers” comes through demo-tape barebones and “Take Your Cut” meets wobbly wah with stage-born reverb and feedback, its intensity showing itself in the fact that they’re in and out in under three minutes as much as in the tube-blowing scorch of the finish.
Side A’s primo hooks in “Drop Out,” “A Man About Town,” “Madame Hit the Wire” (also the longest song at 5:33, with due strut), “Eczema” and “Victim” manifest character as well as style, burgeoning individualism of craft alongside deceptively clear, resonant artistic purpose. A reboot disdainful of reboot culture, in some ways at least, the album lends fresh perspective to what was while casually dropping encouraging clues as to what might or could be. The kids — swallowed whole by rampant corporate greed amid mass shootings so normalized they barely register anymore and in a decade still very much with the shadow of plague cast over it — may or may not be alright, but they can write a tune, and they’re only correct to be pissed off, burnt out, and as disillusioned as they seemingly are.
So yeah, punk rock, and likely to be embraced more by arthouse than warehouse for its disposition, but that’s hardly their fault. It’s not a perfect release and if it was it would be wrong, but listening to the shine on that initial guitar of “Drop Out” and the understated tumult that ensues, Laurel Canyon leave little question that they are what they need to be in terms of time, place and attack, playing softer-landing verses and no-kicks-slam-dancing choruses off each other like it’s Reading Festival in 1992, except it’s not that thing and fuck your Gen-X nostalgia anyway. Ultimately, Laurel Canyon has more to say about the future than the past, especially about the band itself, who even as they round out with “Sade” still sound like they’re about to come flying apart. Where does this go 10 years from now, one wonders, since that’s the part of the story that’s never been told before.
And who the hell knows if it’ll be told this time either; universe of infinite possibility and all that. Laurel Canyon can call it quits tomorrow and be done before their first album is even released, but the point here goes beyond their potential or the revivalist aspects of this work. It’s the sense of exploration in the material that makes it exciting, the feeling that the songs — despite being a couple years old — are new to the band as well as to the listener, and with the added intrigue of how they got to where they are sound-wise, the abiding impression is that there’s further they can push it and themselves as they move forward. Here’s hoping.
Laurel Canyon‘s Laurel Canyon is streaming in full below, followed by more info from the PR wire.
Please enjoy:
Strap yourself in people, we have here the debut full length from Philly’s Laurel Canyon; after some online EP releases, and a (now) sold out 7″ with Savage Pencil, Agitated Records is excited to announce the release of their self-titled album! Guitars are drenched in an Asheton worshipping haze and pummel, melded alongside a Velvets chug and mid-to-late 80s Pacific Northwest guttural / primal howl… this is American primitive music at its most powerful. Pigeonholers beware, this album takes its cues from all the most potent places… Funhouse, Loaded, Green River, early Sub Pop, all providing valid reference points.
In amongst this over-amped harmonious murk are 10 visceral and catchy pop songs practically screaming for attention, the core members of Serg, Nick, and Dylan have created a beast of a record.
Some tracks were recorded with Steve Albini, some with Bryce Goggin and all were mastered by Howie Weinberg.
The band played 40 chaotic shows in 2022 alone from New York City to Los Angeles, where they opened for Agent Orange and Strawberry Alarm Clock on two separate occasions at the Whisky a Go Go.
