Posted in Whathaveyou on August 8th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
I know that of course in addition to the original by Lynyrd Skynyrd, at one point or other Corrosion of Conformity also took on “On the Hunt” for a cover version, but this being from the era of their debut album, 2000’s Further (discussed here) makes it somewhat bittersweet. You can see the pictures of Baby Solace below, and you’ll remember the band lost their original, long-since-out-of-the-lineup-but-still-on-these-records original vocalist Jason earlier this year. Posting this news a day late because I didn’t want to read the email and have to listen to the track is like the most me-specific avoidance of emotional labor I could hope for in a given afternoon. But, well, here we are.
The 25th anniversary reissue of Further is out Aug. 22. Screw the band and the label both for making me feel feelings about it.
Not really though. They’re okay.
From the PR wire:
SOLACE release advance single ‘On the Hunt’ taken from the expanded reissue of debut album “Further”
SOLACE drop their never-before released rendition of the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic ‘On the Hunt’ as the final advance single from the expanded and remastered new edition of their debut full-length “Further” (2000), which the American stoner metal stalwarts release in celebration of the album’s 25th anniversary.
The enhanced & remastered version of “Further” has been chalked up for release on August 22, 2025 via Magnetic Eye Records and is available for pre-order here:http://lnk.spkr.media/solace-further
Tracklist 1. Man Dog (2025 Remaster) 2. Black Unholy Ground (2025 Remaster) 3. Followed (2025 Remaster) 4. Whistle Pig (2025 Remaster) 5. Hungry Mother (2025 Remaster) 6. Angels Dreaming (2025 Remaster) 7. Suspicious Tower (2025 Remaster) 8. Heavy Birth/2-Fisted (2025 Remaster) 9. Another Life 10. We Bite 11. On the Hunt 12. Heavy Birth/2-Fisted (Distanced from Reality version) 13. Dirt 14. Funk #49 (Live in Tokyo ’98)
Recording line-up Jason – voice, lyrics Tommy Southard – guitars Bill “Bixby” Belford – drums Rob Hultz – bass
Produced by Eric Rachel and Solace Recorded by Eric Rachel at Trax East, South River, NJ (US) Mixed by Eric Rachel at Trax East, South River NJ (US) Mastering by Alan Douches at West Westside Music, Hudson Valley, NY (US)
Cover painting: “Midnight Mass 2” by Wes Benscoter Original layout by Frank Bridges 2025 layout by Łukasz Jaszak
Tim Cronin was one of the kindest people you could hope to meet, in a heavy-underground context or any other. I don’t remember when we first got in touch, but I’m pretty sure it was when I was in college, through his band The Ribeye Bros. His passing earlier this week after being diagnosed with ALS in March leaves a couple unfillable holes behind, in music as well as in the lives of those who knew and loved him. He was somebody who was nice to me and had no need or reason to be. Among humans, that makes him tops in my book. He took the Obelisk Questionnaire in 2022 and it was always a pleasure to hear from him whether he had new music happening or not. New Jersey and rock and roll will miss him, let alone family, friends and bandmates, and those who knew him even casually.
Cronin was an original member of pre-Monster Magnet, when the band was himself, Dave Wyndorf, John McBain and a whole lot of weirdo restlessness. They played under different names, different shows, different ideas. Following heavy space rock whims in the late ’80s when most kids were getting down with a slice of Warrant’s “Cherry Pie.” Test Patterns Vol. 1 was released in 2022 on God Unknown Records with two early versions of the acid-slacker epic “Tab” plastered across its sides, each an entrancing, underproduced abyss waiting to swallow the listener. Hawkwind through the looking glass. The stuff of mirror universes. All go.
It wasn’t the first archival Monster-Magnet-before-they-were-Monster-Magnet-type release. One shudders to imagine how many tapes like this are sitting, what, in Dave Wyndorf’s garage?, when they should probably be in the Library of Congress for preservation and future research. In 2001, Wrong Way Records put out Love Monster as a collection of material from around the same time, with songs like “Atom Age Vampire,” “War Hippie” and “Five Years Ahead” and a sound that was about as raw as one could expect for having been tracked in a rehearsal space during the Reagan years. I don’t think it was actually recorded on a phone answering machine, but you get the idea.
The journey of “Tab” — gorgeous and muddy in kind, a headphone-ready, close-your-eyes piece of transportive potential drawing a distorted line in the sand between the squares and those who can dig it, existentially speaking — of course has its most known representation on the 1991 25…Tab EP (reissue review here, discussed here), but is different every time. This owes to the open and unsolidified nature of what Monster Magnet were at the time — it’s not every song that can feature twice on a 48-minute LP that holds nothing else, either literally or figuratively — and the experimentalism driving them. They were all fuck-around and the music was the find-out.
“Tab” on Test Patterns Vol. 1 has been remixed and remastered and whatnot, but it’s still one of the greatest pieces of freakery ever put to tape. I know there’s a lot of weird stuff out there, and that’s a good thing, but Monster Magnet were too ragamuffin for the arthouse set — and thus at the vanguard — and because they went on to more commercial sounds and successes, there’s an entire subset of their fanbase that never knew from whence the “Spacelord” came. “Tab” amplifies their loss. The voidbound echoes in the midsection, where you can’t quite tell anymore what’s backwards or forwards and it kind of all sounds like noise but there’s still that strum of guitar, embody this. Once they got the lineup solidified, signed to Caroline and moved on to making albums like 1991’s Spine of God (reissue review here, discussed here) and 1993’s Superjudge (discussed here), they brought more structured craft. But I’ll argue that as straightforward as they’ve ever gotten — and there have been ebbs and flows throughout Monster Magnet’s career of weirdoism; sometimes it’s personnel, sometimes it’s Wyndorf directing, sometimes it’s just life, I think — their foundation in noisy, mess-around-with-sound psychedelia and space rock has always been a distinguishing factor. Cronin was an essential part of that.
Side B’s “Tab (1988 Demo)” is — you guessed it — even rawer. It begins with chimes and mellow swirl in a call to prayer and soon oozes its way through a lysergic morass of drift and noise. The sound has obviously been cleared up, but Wyndorf’s croon is largely indecipherable and that’s fine. It’s about the atmosphere, the density of the wash they create, more than any single element peaking through the mix. That lifeline strum is there, even more buried, but the persona of the demo “Tab” is more meditative, even less ‘song’ in the traditional sense than a piece for worship set forth by those chimes. To be sure, it’s not any gods you’ve ever heard of being called down, but the mad-howling drag of the later reaches are definitely in communion with something.
I picked Test Patterns — and I don’t know that there will ever be a Vol. 2 or not, especially now — to close the week to honor Cronin, and to underscore the idea that sometimes we don’t know at the time the impact that our actions will have. No way John McBain, Cronin or Wyndorf knew that the band they were shaping would still exist more than 35 years later, let alone have the influence or reach Monster Magnet have enjoyed. But that’s just it. People do things all the time, put stuff out into the world, and sometimes it’s pretty special. I used to read Cronin’s blog about Jack’s Music customers. I dug his collages of cut-and-pasted LP art a lot. Between the Ribeyes and doing lights and whathaveyou for Monster Magnet, with whom he stayed close for decades even after not being in the band anymore, he was always working on something, plugging a show, etc. Putting art into the world, making it better.
On behalf of myself and this site, condolences to Cronin’s friends, family, bandmates, and really the entirety of my beloved Garden State, which is certainly poorer for his passing. I don’t know how you start a campaign to rename streets or anything like that, but if there isn’t a Tim Cronin Blvd. in Red Bank sometime soon, we’ll know for certain there’s no justice in the universe. Rest in peace, Tim, and thanks for everything.
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In light of the above and out of respect to Cronin’s memory, I’m going to leave it there for this week. I know this interrupts the Parliament-Funkadelic series of Friday Full-Lengths. I’ll get back to that next week. Until then, thank you for reading and I wish you a great and safe weekend. Hydrate. Tell someone you love them. Fuck ICE. Fuck fascism.
Posted in Whathaveyou on June 17th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Aug. 22 is the release date here, but we’re talking about a record that came out 25 years ago, so I’m not sure how precise we need to be. Further (discussed here), counterintuitive to its title, was the first Solace full-length, released in 2000 — a quarter of a century ago. The good news is I saw Solace in January (review here) and they still bring it.
The celebration around this anniversary — and if you know this record, I don’t need to tell you it indeed is a thing to be celebrated; they have the remaster of opener “Man Dog” up now; check the bottom of the post — is made bittersweet in the context of the passing this January of original Solace vocalist Jason. He was long-enough out of the band by the time they put out The Brink (review here) in 2019, but remains a pivotal part of their legacy. Further neatly encapsulates that.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say here. Maybe I’ll get to stream it. I don’t know. It’s cool that this is on Magnetic Eye, though, as it was label manager Jadd Shickler‘s past imprint — MeteorCity — that had the original release.
25 years, a quarter of a century, is a very long time in the life of any human being. And maybe even more so, in the lifespan of a recording of music. Yet “Further” by American stoner metal band SOLACE, first released at the turn of the millennium, has stood the test of time. Its tracks feel just as contemporary and relevant as in the year 2000.
A 25th anniversary is a great occasion for an enhanced, extended, and re-mastered edition of a timeless classic, but this much-deserved reissue was already decided upon when original SOLACE singer Jason L. sadly passed away in January 2025. This turns the new edition of “Further” into an unplanned but due tribute to his legacy and everything that Jason brought to the band during his formative years as their tortured and brilliant frontman.
SOLACE are celebrated veterans of the American metal scene. Hailing from Asbury Park, New Jersey at the windswept shore of the Western Atlantic, the band was founded in 1996. Built on a solid foundation of classic metal, early doom and punk ethic, the original four-piece infused a healthy dose of hardcore fury into grooving, grinding sludge.
Three years after the success of “Further” on both sides of the Atlantic, SOLACE returned with the sophomore album “13” (2003) that witnessed the Americans expanding and solidifying their style by highlighting the epic side of their songwriting. In the wake of this album, the band was invited twice to perform at the prestigious Roadburn Festival in 2006 and 2009, which further endeared them to an international audience.
Following a string of singles and EPs, the shoremen returned with the acclaimed third album “A.D.” in 2010. Although this release was again well received, a hiatus followed during which SOLACE implemented changes in their line-up. This maneuver got the heavy ship afloat again, and the remarkable full-length number four, “The Brink”, made landfall in 2019. This album has been described as a glorious trek through churning riffage, weighty doom power and drunken sea shanties, while the massive use of NWOBHM dual-guitar attack was also gladly noted.
SOLACE call their amalgamation of doom and heavy metal with hardcore elements dirt metal, while elsewhere it has been somewhat tongue-in-cheekily dubbed shorecore. Others file the New Jersey five-piece under stoner metal – and in truth, all these descriptions fit to an extent.
Raise a glass to Jason’s legacy and enjoy his outstanding performance on SOLACE’s debut album “Further” that has been diligently and respectfully remastered to shine brighter than ever before!
Band: Solace Album title: Further Style: Stoner Metal Re-release date: August 22, 2025 Label: Magnetic Eye Records
Tracklist 1. Man Dog (2025 Remaster) 2. Black Unholy Ground (2025 Remaster) 3. Followed (2025 Remaster) 4. Whistle Pig (2025 Remaster) 5. Hungry Mother (2025 Remaster) 6. Angels Dreaming (2025 Remaster) 7. Suspicious Tower (2025 Remaster) 8. Heavy Birth/2-Fisted (2025 Remaster) 9. Another Life 10. We Bite 11. On the Hunt 12. Heavy Birth/2-Fisted (Distanced from Reality version) 13. Dirt 14. Funk #49 (Live in Tokyo ’98)
Recording line-up Jason – voice, lyrics Tommy Southard – guitars Bill “Bixby” Belford – drums Rob Hultz – bass
Produced by Eric Rachel and Solace Recorded by Eric Rachel at Trax East, South River, NJ (US) Mixed by Eric Rachel at Trax East, South River NJ (US) Mastering by Alan Douches at West Westside Music, Hudson Valley, NY (US)
Cover painting: “Midnight Mass 2” by Wes Benscoter Original layout by Frank Bridges 2025 layout by Łukasz Jaszak
Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 24th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
This was a band that could, and regularly did, put on a hell of a show. Didn’t matter that you were in The Saint or the Brighton at 10PM on some Wednesday or other in 2003 — Lord Sterling were about to rip a hole in the cosmos. The band were based in Long Branch and had a connection to Monster Magnet through bassist Jim Baglino, who also held down low end for the Garden State heavy forerunners at the time, but were their own thing through and through. Frontman Robert Ryan, shouting and madcap in “This Time it’s for Real” or “Tough Times for the Troubadours” but mellow and Floydian in the repetitions of “Thread Will Be Torn” from the band’s third and final LP, 2004’s Today’s Song for Tomorrow, defined no small part of their onstage persona, but guitarist Mike Schweigert (also Moog), Baglino (also also Moog) and drummer Jason Silverio explored psychedelic textures and classic blowout heavy rock in a way that was prescient of a generation of spacey stylizations and managed to do so from a foundation of influence in hardcore and post-hardcore. So it’s been over 20 years and I still don’t know where the organ in “Password” or the ultra-Hawkwindian push of “Hidden Flame” — which feels prescient of Ecstatic Vision to such a degree that I’d advocate the Philly band covering the song because (1:) it’s good and (2:) they could make it their own without it being too obvious — come from, but I do know that Lord Sterling delivered range without pretense, were not afraid of scope, and never harnessed that to the sacrifice of raw energy.
Lord Sterling had two records before Today’s Song for Tomorrow, which rivals Nebula in its out-the-airlock spacey vibe and caps with an of-its-era take on Pink Floyd‘s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” which feels at half a solar system’s remove from the barroom rock of “Poison Lips” or the punk it seems to lead toward in the second half of “Evaporate” and “Tough Times for the Troubadours” before the title-track is over everything in a way that feels very Sonic Youth but that could just be the East Coast talking. Along the way, whether it’s the Stooges garage sway into the noisy finish of “Poison Lips” or “Hidden Flame” with Ryan‘s sitar setting the central rhythm, the punking-up of Monster Magnet that coincides with the title line being shouted into the cacophony, the pointedly mellow twist that “Thread Will Be Torn” offers — if we’re talking prescience and “Hidden Flame” anticipates Ecstatic Vision, I would cite “Thread Will Be Torn” as a heads up on Tau and the Drones of Praise for some of its cross-source worldly spirit and the fuzzy drift that winds through its subdued flow, but if you want to say the band called it on neo-psych becoming a thing more generally, I wouldn’t argue — they answer impulses toward structure and freakout in kind. Additional drumming by Keith Ackerman (The Atomic Bitchwax, ex-Solace) and Hammond, piano and strings from Shane M. Green helped flesh out arrangements that already demonstrated the flexibility to withstand them.
I guess maybe Lord Sterling were subject to the perils of being a band somewhat between different styles. New York at the time had a pretty clear divide between who was playing hipster classic garage indie and who wasn’t. Lord Sterling — certainly in either of their first two records, 1997’s Your Ghost Will Walk or the more arc-defining 2002 follow-up, Weapon of Truth, which came out on the Tee Pee-adjacent Rubric Records, run (I believe) by at least some of the crew behind Manhattan’s the Knitting Factory when that was a thing — could veer between the brash and the aggressive, and they weren’t shy about either when they got there. I saw them a bunch during this period and won’t feign impartiality. But of Today’s Song for Tomorrow‘s tracks, cuts like “Pivotal Plane,” “This Time it’s for Real” and “Evaporate” stand out from remembering the band bringing them to life on stage. Since it’s been more than two decades, that feels notable, even if it has little to do with how someone listening for the first time will hear them.
If you are new to Lord Sterling though — if, say, you’re not from New Jersey, which is enough in itself to make you weird where I come from, which is New Jersey — as you take on Today’s Song for Tomorrow there are a couple things to keep in mind. One, this record came out 21 years ago. I’m not saying it’s sounds cutting edge, but if “Password” showed up as a single in my inbox I certainly wouldn’t call it dated. Two, no matter where they go, it’s punk-based. They’re ’90s hardcore kids. That’s true of the tantric psych mediation of “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” and the grungey shrugoff in “Today’s Song for Tomorrow” itself, and the charged psychedelic rock wrought by “Hidden Flame.” Everywhere Lord Sterling go, they depart from the same place. That will help unite the songs in your mind, but Ryan‘s vocals — like a not-shitty Jim Morrison — play a role there too, wanting nothing for depth or expressive force in mood.
I don’t know what these guys are up to. Ryan, who I think had the nickname Bing (?), was tattooing. Like 15 years ago, I saw Schweigert in his more aggro next band, The Ominous Order of Filthy Mongrels, but I’m not sure if anything ever came of that or what, because life happens and so on. The good news is this record’s still out there. I know CDs of all three Lord Sterling full-lengths still exist, certainly the latter two, but in a time when turn-of-the-century heavy is getting another look, their take feels like it’s communing with a whole bunch of stuff that’s come out since while remaining firm in its own perspective. Maybe recent events have me feeling nostalgic for this era of NJ heavy. Brighton Bar, and such. That’s fine. You could do a lot worse than to listen to something because you like it.
Thanks for reading.
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It snowed here last Sunday night. There was no school Monday, which was also the presidential inauguration, because of MLK Day. We went sledding with two other families from The Pecan’s first grade class, folks we know from school pickup and being around the school generally, blah blah. Normal suburban bourgeois shit. You get the picture.
We were there for maybe an hour and got some good sledding in before The Pecan took a borrowed sled face-first into a metal fencepole, opening a gash in her forehead wide enough that her skull could be seen by anyone who managed to bring themselves to look. I ran down the hill and picked her up — no loss of consciousness or responsiveness; we’ve done head trauma in the past, remember; you look immediately for these things — and her face was of course covered in blood because it’s a headwound. There were a bunch of families on the sledding hill behind the high school, and it turned out that included two moms who were RNs. Fucking women, man. Dudes are clueless. Do you know how wrecked society would be if men actually ran it? I mean, how wrecked it is anyway?
Anyhow, these moms were great and got my kid in a useful position and started to clean her up, ask her questions, tell me what to do, while we waited for the ambulance to come. The cop came first, obviously. Not like he was doing anything. Another dumb boy to get in the way of Competent Moms sorting shit out. Mom #2 had a roll of paper towels, for crying out loud. Officer Mehoff could never hope to compete with that.
The EMT worker in the back of the ambulance, it turned out, liked Zelda, so we chatted about Echoes of Wisdom on the way to the emergency room, which was good for keeping The Pecan (and me, in the interest of honesty), calm. Once we saw the cleaned up wound — featuring, again, her actual fucking skull — we knew the tenor of the day had changed. The Patient Mrs. showed up at the ER, having run home to grab clothes and such (my pants were still wet from sitting on the ground, kid was covered in blood, and so on) and we sat for about an hour and waited in the pediatric ER. A nurse had come through and stuck some gauze in the hole in her forehead, wrapped it up, and she watched Zelda fan-theory YouTube videos on my phone while we waited. The Patient Mrs. read on her iPad. I nodded off in the chair.
A couple rounds of talking to the doctor and like two earth hours later, we ended up driving east on Rt. 80 — The Patient Mrs. drove there, I drove home; a little unnerving being in the car with a major open wound on board — to the office of every plastic surgeon you’ve ever seen in a movie, who would finally close her up and send us on our way for ice cream, confident the dent in her face wasn’t permanent and that, indeed, all would be well by his next teetime, surely within 24 hours. Place was a riot, unless you thought of it as an example of the horrors that stem from mixing capital and medicine. But what fun is that? Or use?
To that end, it was almost fortunate that my seven-year-old daughter broke open her face early in the sunny afternoon, because it offered an excellent chance to not watch, or listen to, or read about, the inauguration. Something better to focus on? Much appreciated, even if the ‘something’ in question is a different kind of terrible.
But she’s doing well, is this Pecan. Both the ER doctor and the plastic surgeon assured The Patient Mrs. and I of her toughness, both saying “I don’t always say this, but…” and then I guess telling us she should go try out for Jackass: TNG or something. Yeah, she’s tough. I know. Try sharing a house.
I don’t know how much of a scar she’ll have. When I was six, I cut my leg open and, like her, it was deep enough to need stitches inside (for muscle) and outside (for the fleshy flesh). I have a six-inch scar on the inside of my right thigh that’s been there calling me stupid for basically my entire life. I’d prefer she have neither the scar nor the self-blame.
We’ve been gooping her head with Neosporin every couple hours, and she’s got antibiotics that are disgusting but that she’s taking anyway, because tough, and “limiting her activity” basically just means The Patient Mrs. and I get stressed out when she runs across the living room furniture, so apart from that — because usually we don’t care — it’s business as usual. She’ll heal up and we’ll be onto the next thing before you know it. What I wonder is whether she’ll remember this long-term. She doesn’t at this point remember falling down the basement stairs and cracking her skull in March 2021 — and fair enough, she was three — but that was a worse trauma than this. For everybody. It’s funny to think this might end up as some defining moment in her life and both her mother and I are like, “Meh, we’ve seen worse. Suck it up, stitchy!”
In any case, if there’s a parenting decision, really any kind of decision about any kind of thing, I’m sure I’m fucking it up. Turns out that the magic someday-I’ll-be-a-grown-up-with-my-shit-together day that I always dreamed was on the horizon is in fact a myth perpetuated to sell hair growth formula and pricey shirts. I’m 43 years old, and given my family history, lifestyle and demographics, there’s just about no feasible way my life isn’t more than halfway over. Some part of me is always going to be that same kid who sat on a glass fishbowl and sliced a hole in his leg big enough to stick your arm through.
My father, hateful and disdainful though he was, applied so much pressure on my bleeding-out leg that I had bruises for weeks after. The doctor said he saved my life, and I believe he did. We didn’t even like each other, ever, and he was for sure no paragon of having his shit together, but that was a thing he did for me. I could barely make it up the sledding hill with my kid without falling down. What a wreck.
And it’s sad, and I know it’s sad, but there’s also a certain kind of freedom in letting go of the expectation that it’s ever going to get better. That there will come a point at which it will all click and I’ll always know where my phone is, or I’ll finally be caught up on vacuuming, or I’ll get in shape in some kind of “once and for all” permanent way that doesn’t even exist in the first place.
I’m not that guy. I never could be. Maybe I’m a loser. Fine. I look around at who’s winning these days and I think maybe I’m better off not.
Thanks for reading and have a great and safe weekend. I’m back Monday with more and I’m in Vegas next week to cover Planet Desert Rock Weekend, which will be a hoot. Much appreciated if you keep up.
Posted in Whathaveyou on October 3rd, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Look. I’m not gonna fart around here. This is Solace we’re talking about. It’s not just another oh-hey-band-who-tours-all-the-time-is-announcing-a-tour sort of announcement. This is a different thing. The New Jersey stalwarts, in defiance of science, any and all gods, and general common sense, will in January embark on a rare-these-days stretch of dates outside the Garden State, making their way to Las Vegas to leave a bruise on Planet Desert Rock Weekend V alongside the likes of Mos Generator, Sergeant Thunderhoof, Unida, and so on. I’ll be honest, I’m looking at flights for it. I don’t know that it’s something I can make happen — finding a place to crash will be a crucial determining factor — but if I end up going, Solace will be a big part of why.
The tour launches Jan. 24 in Richmond, Virginia, after a Jan. 3 show in Atlantic City celebrating the birthday of one of the two members in the band named Justin, and if you’ll notice, there are still a couple TBD dates as they make their way through Texas and into the Southwest. They’ve got Dallas, Austin and Phoenix listed, so if you’re in any of those places and can help out, do. Not only is it good karma sure to be repaid by the universe in some manner, but you’re also bound to reap a sick payday from the insurance when Solace blow the roof off whatever room you put them in. Book the gig and get ready to make a claim. I’ve seen them any number of times in any number of situations and they have never, ever, ever, not delivered.
Bonus that they’ll have new material to work out on the road. Their last record was 2019’s The Brink (review here) on Blues Funeral, and 2025 would be as good a time as any for a foll0w-up. But Solace don’t owe anyone anything, so whatever they do and whenever they do it, it’s a thing to be treasured.
From the PR wire:
SOLACE will be hitting the road January 2025 on our way out to Vegas for Planet Desert Rock Fest.
We are thrilled that we’re finally going to play a few cities that we haven’t had the chance to visit.
Right now we’re polishing up new material and plan to get into the studio next spring for the follow-up to The Brink. We’ll be playing some of this on the road for sure as well as a few “classics” from our earlier years.
Solace live: -Fri Jan. 3rd Atlantic City, NJ @ Anchor Rock Club, Justin’s Birthday Bash w/ Michael Rudolph Cummings & Johnny Pipe, Featuring “Master of Ceremonies” BRIAN O’HALLORAN -Thurs Jan. 23rd Richmond, VA @ Bandito’s w/ Book of Wyrms -Fri Jan. 24th Atlanta, GA @ Star Bar w/ Hot Ram -Sat Jan. 25th New Orleans, LA @ Siberia -Mon Jan. 27th Houston, TX @ Black Magic Social Club -Tues Jan. 28th TBD, Dallas -Wed Jan. 29th TBD, Austin -Fri Jan. 31st TBD, Phoenix -Sat Feb. 1st Las Vegas, NV @ Planet Desert Rock Fest -Fri March 28 Baltimore, MD @ The Depot -Sat March 29 Columbus, OH @ Ace Of Cups
The riff-mad scourge of the Jersey Shore, Solace made their full-length debut in 2000 through MeteorCity with the somewhat counterintuitively titled Further. What was then the four-piece of guitarist Tommy Southard, bassist Rob Hultz (now of Trouble), drummer Bill “Bixby” Belford and the vocalist I only ever knew by his first name, Jason. Southard and Hultz had been in punk bands together before their heavier post-grunge outfit Godspeed — whose lineup also featured Chris Kosnik pre-The Atomic Bitchwax and current Solace drummer Tim Schoenleber — were snagged in a major label cull by Atlantic Records (see also: Core) following the emergence of Monster Magnet. In 1994, they released their lone LP, Ride, toured with Black Sabbath and Cathedral, and collaborated with Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden on the Nativity in Black tribute album. It was quite a time.
Solace was a different animal. And very definitely an animal. Further was preceded by the Jersey Devils EP (discussed here), which came out in 1999 through MeteorCity and Freebird Records as a split with fellow Garden Staters Solarized, as well as a demo tape (yes, a tape) and a two-songer 7″, but obviously its 53-plus minutes were the first deeper look at what they were about. Mostly volatility.
Were they punk? Hardcore? Metal? They could be righteously aggressive and noisy, roll on a riff for however long, or twist their way through polar shifts within the span of a song like “Black Unholy Ground” or charge through the scorching “Whistle Pig” before turning to acoustic-led melancholia on “Hungry Mother.” Further was likewise chaotic and dynamic, but it all somehow held together. Southard would prove to be the madman behind the madcap, but taken as a whole, Further feels untamed and willful, and when they hit it, the force of their delivery remains unto itself. I’m not going to pretend to be impartial about the band or this record, but after I don’t even want to guess how many times I’ve heard it, I’m still blindsided almost every time.
The seven-minutes-each “Mandog” and “Black Holy Ground” open, and “Followed,” which follows (ha.), tops eight, so by the time you’re three songs into it, it’s been about 25 minutes. And from the first punch of Hultz‘s bass as “Mandog” kicks in to the manic careening circa five minutes in, the shred and the way they seem to throw the song down the stairs as they enter the fade, it remains a signature piece. “Black Holy Ground” is tense in the drums and finds Jason brooding in the first verse, but malleable enough as a singer to carry that melody and move to a shoutier approach as the proceedings grow more intense. It all ends in a wash of noise, but before that, there’s that-era-Clutch-worthy nod and hardcore-punk forward thrust, and 24 years later you’re still kind of left wondering how it all holds together.
Because with some bands, it’s the bass or the drums keeping a central rhythm while the guitar goes off and does it’s thing. You hear that a lot. It’s the classic power trio modus. With Further, it’s not that Solace aren’t tight — if they weren’t, the album probably wouldn’t exist — but that it’s all-in on all-out. Everybody’s in on it. Maybe that applies to the vocals to a lesser extent, but even over the course of “Followed,” Jason ends up in a much different place than he began in topping the build first with subdued, low-mouth singing and barking out later for “Some semblance of self/Some semblance of love” before the cymbal wash leads into the finish. “Whistle Pig” and the later “Suspicious Tower” are shorter and more direct, but still dare the listener to keep up if they can, and on the other side of “Hungry Mother” awaits the tense plod of “Angels Dreaming,” which spends its first four minutes holding itself back tempo-wise before finally breaking free with what in a lot of contexts would be boogie but in Solace‘s hands becomes a sledge. And of course the solo nudges in on psychedelic territory before the big slowdown, because how could it not?
It’s not that Solace, even at this point, were ever lazy in songwriting or haphazard stylistically. Rest assured, they’ve always known precisely what they’re about; it’s who they are. And Further was cohesive — it’s not that Solace got pissed off, hit record and that was it. The record makes its own kind of sense, and its refusal to do otherwise or to compromise in persona or spirit is palpable, whether it’s “Hungry Mother” or “Suspicious Tower,” which starts with a sample from the 1962 sci-fi flick The Creation of the Humanoids, or the 11-minute “Heavy Birth/2-Fisted,” for which my brain still does a “holy shit here we go” every time it comes on. Aggro groove, a trippy middle with toms thudding away behind paid off by shred and a cacophonous but controlled assault to end its extended, sweeping course. I’m not sure how many other bands could even turn that into a song, let alone that one.
Tumult be thy name. Different editions of Further have bonus covers of Iron Maiden‘s “Another Life” and Misfits‘ “We Bite,” the latter of which feels like a better fit but both of which are thoroughly brought into Solace‘s own sound. And maybe that’s not such a surprise now, nearly a quarter-century after the fact with however many microgenres branched off from the core of heavy rock and roll, but the punk-metal Solace wrought on Further would remain a definitive presence in their subsequent work, whether it was 2003’s 13 (discussed here), the 2004 split with Greatdayforup that introduced Justin Daniels on yes-we-need-more guitar, or the fraught-in-the-making 2010 third album, A.D. (review here), after which they actually disbanded until coming back with a new lineup for the 2017 EP, Bird of Ill Omen (review here) and ensuing fourth full-length, The Brink (review here), which in all honesty I’ll tell you was something I didn’t imagine would ever actually happen until late-2019 when it did.
And what could be more Solace than that? The very definition of ‘you never know.’ Now fronted by Justin “Has a Surname” Goins, with Southard and Daniels on guitar, the aforementioned Schoenleber on drums and bassist Mike Sica, Solace are slated to play next year’s Planet Desert Rock Weekend in Las Vegas, and whether it’s there or some dive in Asbury — they were the kings of Long Branch’s The Brighton Bar, sadly closed — I would encourage you heartily to witness first-hand what they bring to the stage when the opportunity presents itself. Fury like no other.
As always, I hope you enjoy. The band have been putting songs up one at a time through their catalog on their YouTube, if you want to hit that up.
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How ’bout that Quarterly Review, huh? It’s a doozy, and if you missed it the other however-many times I said so, it’s only halfway over. 50 more reviews will roll out next Monday to Friday, so sit tight. Plenty more to come.
Tonight is the variety show for The Pecan’s school. It’s at the high school auditorium, kind of a big deal to the kids, blah blah. She’s doing a stand-up routine of math jokes. Killed at dress rehearsal. Brave, all that. Fine. It’s at 6PM, which because I’m in my 40s feels like a decent time for a show to start.
The Zelda saga continues in our home. We borrowed my nephew’s old GameCube so we could play The Wind Walker this week. Between The Patient Mrs. and I, I’m pretty sure someone has gotten hit in Zelda-related incidents the last three days in a row, so you can see how that’s going. Last night I got hit — hard — for falling in lava in whatever early-game dungeon it was, and just kind of shut down for the night. The Patient Mrs., prone to taking it all on herself anyway, stepped in and got the grappling hook, but yeah. Broadly speaking, it sucked. We had a good first night with it on Sunday, but then, the new thing is always an easy day.
Parenting.
We’re also shit-broke, so that’s a fun additional layer of stress. Turns out the impending Budapest trip cost all the money forever. Yay.
Have a great and safe weekend. I’m gonna shower after dropoff, throw in a load of laundry and try to find some kind of breakfast that isn’t binge-eating cheese or almond/pecan butter. I’ll start setting up the next QR post for Monday and maybe do some listening, but the break is what I’m after, so the sooner I’m in it the better. Though the shower is imperative there as well.
Posted in Whathaveyou on May 8th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
I know the various eras of Monster Magnet have their fans, but what to me undebatable about the long-running New Jersey-based heavy rock progenitors is the impact they’ve had across the span of their career. Whichever of their records is your favorite — their most recent outing, 2022’s demo-comp Test Patterns: Vol. 1, rawly highlighted the unhinged early cosmic weirdness of “TAB” in the band’s formative state as the trio of Dave Wyndorf, Tim Cronin and John McBain — you would have a hard time overstating their contribution to rock and roll, period, broadening the scope of post-grunge commercialism with hard riffs and due sneer in the later-’90s after emerging from the roots presented on Test Patterns to cast a singular mold of heavy space and psychedelic rock earlier in that decade.
Through the tumult of lineup changes, addiction, a couple ultimately-middling-but-still-smarter-than-everybody LPs and more besides in the ’00s, and a 2010s that included some of their most accomplished work in bringing together the styles explored in disparate succession prior, Wyndorf has steered Monster Magnet to grandmaster status. As they celebrate the 35th anniversary of the band later this year with a European tour built around previously-announced headliner slots at Madrid, Spain’s Kristonfest, Up in Smoke in Switzerland and Desertfest Belgium in Antwerp, I find myself most of all hoping that the 1989-2024 logo featured on the poster below ends up on a t-shirt at some non-bootleg merch outlet. And as I was lucky enough to see what I think is still the current incarnation of the band — Wyndorf on vocals/guitar alongside six-stringers Phil Caivano and Garrett Sweeney, Bob Pantella on drums, Alec Morton on bass — last year headlining Desertfest New York (review here), I can only advise catching them when and if you can whether you’ve seen them before or not. At some point, Dave Wyndorf is gonna get sick of this shit. Clearly he’s not there yet, but it could happen.
Dates are on the poster (in the old days, you used to get a press release about this kind of thing, but don’t let me complain) below, along with the note about tickets going on sale this Friday.
Right on:
Announcing – Monster Magnet 35th Anniversary Tour: 1989-2024 Tickets On-sale: Fri 10 May 2024 (10am CEST / 9am BST).
Posted in Reviews on October 5th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Welcome to Thursday of the Fall 202 Quarterly Review. It’s been a good run so far. three days and 30 records, about to be four and 40. I’ve got enough on my desktop and there’s enough stuff coming out this month that I could probably do a second Fall QR in November, and maybe stave off needing to do a double-one in December as I had been planning in the back of my head. Whatever, I’ll figure it out.
I hope you’ve been able to find something you dig. I definitely have, but that’s how it generally goes. These things are always a lot of work, and somehow I seem to plan them on the busiest weeks — today we’re volunteering at the grade school book fair; I think I’ll dig out my old Slayer God Hates Us All shirt from 20 years ago and see if it still fits. Sadly, I think we all know how that experiment will work out.
Anyway, busy times, good music, blah blah, let’s roll.
Quarterly Review #31-40:
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Darsombra, Dumesday Book
Forever touring and avant garde to their very marrow, ostensibly-Baltimorean duo Darsombra — Ann Everton on keys, vocals, live visuals, and who the hell knows what else, Brian Daniloski on guitar, a living-room pedal board, and engineering at the band’s home studio — unveil Dumesday Book as a 75-minute collection not only of works like “Call the Doctor” (posted here) or “Call the Doctor” (posted here), which appear as remixes, but their first proper album of this troubled decade after 2019’s Transmission (review here) saw them reach so far out into the cosmic thread to harness their bizarre stretches of bleeps and boops, manipulated vocals, drones, noise and suitably distraught collage in “Everything is Canceled” — which they answer later with “Still Canceled,” because charm — but the reassurance here is in the continuation of Daniloski and Everton‘s audio adventures, and their commitment to what should probably at this point in space-time be classified as free jazz remains unflinching. Squares need not apply, and if you’re into stuff like structure, there’s some of that, but all Darsombra ever need to get gone is a direction in which to head — literally or figuratively — so why not pick them all?
Cavernous in its echo and with a grit of tone that is the aural equivalent of the feeling of pull in your hand when you make a doom claw, The Banishing is the second full-length from Italian doom rockers Bottomless. Working as the trio of vocalist/guitarist Giorgio Trombino (ex-Elevators to the Grateful Sky, etc.), drummer David Lucido (Assumption, among a slew of others) and bassist Sara Bianchin — the latter also of Messa and recently replaced in Bottomless by Laura Nardelli (Ponte del Diavolo, etc.) — the band follow their 2021 self-titled debut (review here) with an eight-track collection that comes across as its own vision of garage doom. It’s not about progressive flourish or elaborate production, but about digging into the raw creeper groove of “Guardians of Silence” or the righteous post-Pentagram chug-and-nod of “Let Them Burn.” It is not solely intended as worship for what’s come before. Doom-of-eld, the NWOBHM, ’70s proto splurges all abound, but in the vocal and guitar melody of “By the Sword of the Archangel” and the dramatic rolling finish of “Dark Waters” after the acoustic-led interlude “Drawn Into Yesterday,” in the gruel of “Illusion Sun,” they channel these elements through themselves and come out with an album that, for as dark and grim as it would likely sound to more than 99 percent of the general human population, is pure heart.
The Death Wheelers, Chaos and the Art of Motorcycle Madness
Look. I don’t know The Death Wheelers personally at all. We don’t hang out on weekends. But the sample-laced (“We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the Man — and we wanna get loaded!” etc.), motorcycle-themed Québecois instrumental outfit sound on their second LP, the 12-track/40-minute riff-pusher Chaos and the Art of Motorcycle Madness, like they’re onto something. And again, I don’t know these cats at all. I don’t know what they do for work, what their lives are like, any of it. But if The Death Wheelers want to get out and give this record the support it deserves, the place they need to be is Europe. Yeah, I know there was The Picturebooks, but they were clean-chrome and The Death Wheelers just cracked a smile and showed you the fly that got splattered on their front tooth while they were riding — sonically speaking. The dust boogie of “Lucifer’s Bend,” the duly stoned “Interquaalude” ahead of the capper duo of “Sissy Bar Strut (Nymphony 69)” and “Cycling for Satan Part II” and the blowout roll in “Ride into the Röt (Everything Lewder Than Everything Else)” — this is a band who should bypass America completely for touring and focus entirely on Europe. Because the US will come around, to be sure, but not for another three or four month-long Euro stints get the point across. I don’t know that that’ll happen or it won’t, but they sound ready.
The career arc of guitarist Phil Caivano — and of course he does other stuff as well, including vocals on his self-titled solo-project’s debut, Caivano, but some people seem to have been born to hold a guitar in their hands and he’s one of those; see also Bob Balch — is both longer and broader than his quarter-century as guitarist and songwriting contributor to Monster Magnet, but the NJ heavy rock stalwarts will nonetheless be the closest comparison point to these 10 tracks and 33 minutes, a kind of signature sleazy roll in “Talk to the Dead,” the time-to-get-off-your-ass push of “Come and Get Me” at the start or the punkier “Verge of Yesterday” — touch of Motörhead there seeming well earned — a cosmic ripper on a space backbeat in “Fun & Games,” but all of this is within a tonal and production context that’s consistent across the span, malleable in style, unshakable in structure. Closer “Face the Music” is the longest cut at 5:04 and is a drumless spacey experiment with vocals and a guitar figure wrapped around a central drone, and that adds yet more character to the proceedings. I’d wonder how long some of these songs or parts have been around or if Caivano is going to put a group together — could be interesting — and make a go of it apart from his ‘main band,’ but he’s long since established himself as an exceptional player, and listening to some of this material highlights contributions of style and substance to shaping Monster Magnet as well. Phil Caivano: songwriter.
Together for nearly a decade, richly informed by the progressive and space rock(s) of the 1970s, prone to headspinning feats of lead guitar like that in the back end of second cut “Dysania,” Entropía offer their second full-length in Eclipses, a five-track/40-minute excursion of organ-inclusive cosmic prog that reminds of Hypnos 69 in the warm serenity at the start of “Tarbes,” threatens the epic on seven-minute opener “Thesan” and delivers readily throughout; a work of scope that runs deep in the pairing of “Tarbes” and “Caleidoscopia” — both of which top nine minutes long — but it’s there that Entropía reveal the full spectrum of light they’re working with, whether it’s that tonal largesse that rears up in the latter or the jazzy kosmiche shove in the payoff of the former. And the drums come forward to start closer “Polaris,” which follows, as Entropía nestle into one more groovy submersion, finding heavy shuffle in the drums — hell yeah — and holding that tension until it’s time for the multi-tiered finish and only-necessary peaceful comedown. It’s inevitable that some records in a Quarterly Review get written about and I never listen to them again. I’ll be back to this one.
God damn, Ghorot, leave some nasty for the rest of the class. The Boise, Idaho, three-piece — vocalist/bassist Carson Russell (also Ealdor Bealu), guitarist/vocalist Chad Remains (ex-Uzala) and drummer/vocalist Brandon Walker — launch their second LP, Wound, with the gloriously screamed, righteously-coated-in-filth, choking-on-mud extreme sludge they appropriately titled “Dredge.” And fuck if it doesn’t get meaner from there as Ghorot — working with esteemed producer Andy Patterson (The Otolith, etc.) and releasing through Lay Bare Recordings and King of the Monsters Records — take the measure of your days and issue summary judgment in the negative through the mellow-harshing bite of “In Asentia,” the least brutal part of which kind of sounds like High on Fire and the death/black metal in centerpiece “Corsican Leather.” All of which is only on side A. On side B, “Canyon Lands” imagines a heavy Western meditation — shades of Ealdor Bealu in the guitar — that retains its old-wizard vocal gurgle, and capper “Neanderskull” finally pushes the entire affair off of whatever high desert cliffside from which it’s been proclaiming all this uberdeath and into a waiting abyss of willfully knuckledragging blower deconstruction. The really scary shit is these guys’ll probably do another record after this one. Yikes.
With the self-release of Outward, heavy progressive psych instrumentalists Moozoonsii complete a duology of pandemic-constructed outings that began with last year’s (of course) Inward, and to do so, the trio based in Nantes, France, continue to foster a methodology somewhere between metal and rock, finding ground in precision riffing in the 10-minute “Nova” or in the bumps and crashes after eight minutes into the 13-minute “Far Waste,” but they’re just as prone to jazzy skronk-outs like in the midsection solo of “Lugubris,” and the entire release is informed by the unfolding psychedelic meditationscape of “Stryge” at the start, so by no, no, no means at all are they doing one thing for the duration. “Toxic Lunar Vibration,” which splits the two noted extended tracks, brings the sides together as if to emphasize this point, not so much fitting those pointed angles together as delighting in the ways in which they do and don’t fit at certain times as part of their creative expression. Pairing that impulse with the kind of heavy-as-your-face-if-your-face-had-a-big-boulder-on-it fuzz in “Tauredunum” is a hell of a place to wind up. The unpredictable character of the material that surrounds only makes that ending sweeter and more satisfying.
An initial two tracks from UK trio Death Wvrm, both instrumental, surfaced earlier this year, one in Spring around the time of their appearance at Desertfest London — quiet a coup for a seemingly nascent band; but listening to them I get it — and after. “Enter” was first, “The Endless” second, and the two of them tell a story unto themselves; narrative seeming to be part of the group’s mission from this point of outset, as each single comes with a few sentences of accompanying scene-setting. Certainly not going to complain about the story, and the band have some other surprises in store in these initial cuts, be it the bright, mid-period Beatles-y tone in the guitar for “The Endless” (it’s actually only about four and a half minutes) or the driving fuzz that takes hold after the snap of snare at 2:59, or the complementary layer of guitar in “Enter” that speaks to broader ambitions sound-wise almost immediately on the part of the band. “Enter” and “The Endless” both start quiet and get louder — the scorch in “Enter” isn’t to be discounted — but they do so in differing ways, and so while one listens to the first two cuts a band is putting out and expects growth in complexity and method, that’s actually just fine, because it’s exactly also what one is left wanting after the two songs are done: more. I’m not saying show up at their house or anything, but maybe give a follow on Bandcamp and keep an eye.
Safe to assume some level of self-awareness on the part of Brazilian trio Mudness who, after unveiling their first single “R.I.P.” in 2020 make their self-titled full-length debut with seven songs of hard-burned wizard riffing, the plod of “Gone” (also an advance single, if not by three years) and guitarist Renan Casarin‘s Obornian moans underscoring the disaffected stoner idolatry. Joined by Fernando Dal Bó, whose bass work is crucial to the success of the entire release — can’t roll it if it ain’t heavy — and drummer Pedro Silvano, who adds malevolent swing to the slow march forward of “This End Body,” the centerpiece of the seven-song/35-minute long player. There’s an interlude, “Lamuria,” that could probably have shown up earlier, but one should keep in mind that the sense of onslaught between the likes of “Evil Roots” and “Yellow Imp” is part of the point, and likewise that they’re saving an extra layer of aural grime for “Final Breeze,” where they answer the more individual take of “This End Body” with a reach into melodicism and mark their appeal both in what they might bring to their sound moving forward and the planet-sucked-anyhow despondent crush of this collection. Putting it on the list for the best debuts of 2023. It’s not innovative, or trying to be, but that doesn’t stop it from accomplishing its aims in slow, mostly miserable stride.
I’m not generally one to tell you how to spend your money, but if you take a look over at The Space Huns‘ Bandcamp page (linked below), you’ll see that the Hungarian psych jammers’ entire digital discography is €3.50. Again, not trying to tell you how to live your life, but Legends of the Ancient Tribes, the Szeged-based trio’s new hour-long album, has a song on it called “Goats on a Discount Private Space Shuttle Voyage,” and from where I sit that entitles the three-piece of guitarist Csaba Szőke, bassist Tamás Tikvicki and drummer Mátyás Mozsár to that cash and perhaps more. I could just as easily note “Sgt. Taurus on Coke” at the start of the outing or “The Melancholic Stag Beetle Who Got Inspired by Corporate Motivational Coaches” — or the essential fact that in addition to the best song titles I’ve seen all year (again, and perhaps more), the jams are ace. Chemistry to spare, patience when it’s called for but malleable enough to boogie or nod and sound no less natural doing either, while keeping an exploratory if not improvisational — and it might be that too — character to the material. It’s not a minor undertaking at 59 minutes, but between the added charm of the track names and the grin-inducing nod of “Cosmic Cities of the Giant Snail Kingdom,” they make it easy.
