Posted in Whathaveyou on September 6th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
I said on Monday (was that yesterday?) when I put up the Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree tour dates that I’d be doing a separate post for Toronto heavy rockers Low Orbit, and here we are. Those two tours — two of the many, many, many runs happening in Europe next month; everybody had the same idea for when the post-pandemic tourscape would align, and so it would seem to — will lock step for a few shows, Low Orbit also have shows alongside White Noise Generator and Sun of Sorrow, plus the Pink Tank Records Festival, so as the tone-hoisting Canadian now-four-piece make ready to cross the Atlantic and spread the good cheer and dense riffage of their 2021 album, Crater Creator (review here), it’s an occasion worth marking. Twice if necessary.
I haven’t had the fortune to see Low Orbit live — I’ve never been to Toronto and I don’t know if they’ve ever been to NJ, but I know a spot that could likely host them if they wanted to come through — but Crater Creator is a heavy crusher of riff and nod in the rawer Monolordian tradition of a big-lumbering-thing-coming-from-space-and-sitting-on-you, and I both own and regularly wear a Low Orbit t-shirt. That is not even close to being something I do for every band.
Dates follow, as per socials:
Greetings Earthlings….we will be embarking on an interstellar voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in the fall to perform a constellation of shows, including multiple dates with Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree and White Noise Generator. We will also be performing at the annual Pink Tank Records Festival for three dates….awesome poster designed in house by our very own Dave Adams.
20.10 Esslingen DE Komma * 21.10 Passau DE Tabakfabrik ** 22.10 Burghausen DE Juz ** 24.10 Prague CZ Balada Bar *** 25.10 Weimar DE C-Kellar * 26.10 Bielefeld DE Potemkin * 27.10 Hamburg DE Fundbuero ^ 28.10 Lubeck DE Treibsand ^ 29.10 Kiel DE Die Pumpe ^ 30.10 Nijmegen NL Onderbroek *
* w/ Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree ** w/ White Noise Generator *** w/ Sun of Sorrow ^ w/ Pink Tank Festival
Posted in Whathaveyou on March 8th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Toronto heavy rockers Low Orbit have announced the addition of second guitarist Dave Adams to their lineup. Adams will make his live debut with the band later this month in their hometown as they continue to support last year’s have-riffs-will-groove full-length Crater Creator (review here), issued through Olde Magick Records and Pink Tank. Listening to the record — which of course you can at the bottom of this post — it makes sense why the band might seek to add another six strings to the arsenal. The album wanted nothing for richness of tone or overarching thickness, so the more the merrier.
A trio bringing in a fourth is no minor shift in dynamic for a band, but as Low Orbit are closing in on a decade’s tenure and Crater Creator is their best-received work to-date, looking to bring it to life in the most impactful way possible seems utterly reasonable. The email came in and I actually nodded and said, “Yeah, makes sense.”
Hope the show’s good. Here’s word from the band:
“A three piece since our inception a decade ago, we are no longer….today we add a fourth member. We would like to warmly welcome Dave Adams into the band. A heavy guitar player and great dude. He will play his first show with us on March 25th at Tail of the Junction. Hope to see you all there.”
Formed in 2013, LOW ORBIT emerged as the culmination of over twenty years experience in the Toronto hard rock, underground scene. The resulting birth is this power trio, who share a genuine passion for their craft, and who strive to play and create the heaviest music this side of the stratosphere.
Posted in Reviews on December 14th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Day two, huh? Don’t know about you, but I’m feeling positively groovy after yesterday’s initial round of 10 records en route to 50 by Friday, and maybe that’s all the better since there’s not only another round of 10 today, but 50 more awaiting in January. Head down, keep working. You know how it goes. Hope you find something cool in this bunch, and if not, stick around because there’s more to come. Never enough time, never enough riffs. Let’s get to it.
Quarterly Review #11-20:
Khemmis, Deceiver
Denver’s Khemmis are everything an American heavy metal band should be in 2021. The six-song Deceiver is the fourth LP from the band — now comprised of guitarist/vocalist Ben Hutcherson, guitarist/vocalist Phil Pendergast and drummer Zach Coleman — and it soars and crushes in kind. It is no more doom than thrash or epic traditional metal, with sweeping choruses from opener “Avernal Gate” onward, and yet it is intense without being boorish, accessible without being dumbed-down, dynamic in presentation. It commits neither to genre nor structure but is born of both, and its well-timed arrangements of more extreme vocalizations on “House of Cadmus” and “Obsidian Crown” are no less vital to its sonic persona than the harmonies surrounding. Even more here than on 2018’s Desolation (review here), Khemmis sound like masters of the form — the kind of band who’d make a kid want to pick up a guitar — and are in a class of their own.
Somebody in Toronto’s Low Orbit likes Dr. Who, as signaled by inclusions like “Tardis” and “Timelord” on the trio’s third album, Crater Creator. Also huge riffs. Working with their hometown’s house helmer Ian Blurton (Rough Spells, Future Now, Biblical, etc.), guitarist/vocalist Angelo Catenaro, bassist Joe Grgic and drummer Emilio Mammone proffer seven songs across two-sides bent toward largesse of chug and spaciousness of… well, space. The opening title-track, which moves into the lumbering “Tardis” and the driving side-A-capper “Sea of See,” sets an expectation for massive tonality that the rest of what follows meets with apparent glee. The fuzz-forward nature of “Monocle” (also the cowbell) feels straightforward after the relative plod of “Empty Space” before it, but “Wormhole” and “Timelord” assure the mission’s overarching success, the latter with aplomb fitting its finale position on such a cosmically voluminous offering. Craters accomplished, at least in eardrums.
One assumes that the Cthulhu figure depicted breaking a lighthouse with its cthrotch on the cover art of Confusion Master‘s Haunted is intended as a metaphor for the coming of the German four-piece’s engrossing psychedelic doom riffery. The band, who made their debut with 2018’s Awaken (review here), owe some debt to Electric Wizard‘s misanthropic stoner nihilism, but the horrors crafted across the six-song/56-minute sophomore outing are their own in sound and depth alike, as outwardly familiar as the lumbering central riff of “The Cannibal County Maniac” might seem. It’s amazing I haven’t heard more hype about Confusion Master, with the willful slog of “Jaw on a Hook”‘s 11 minutes so dug in ahead of the sample-topped title-track you can’t really call it anything other than righteous in its purpose, as filthy as that purpose is on the rolling “Casket Down” or “Under the Sign of the Reptile Master.” Shit, they don’t even start vocals until minute six of 10-minute opener “Viking X.” What more do you want? Doom the fuck out.
Sludge metal punishment serves as the introductory statement of Los Angeles’ Daemonelix, whose Devil’s Corkscrew EP runs just 18 minutes and four songs but needs no more than that to get its message across. The band, led by guitarist Derek Phillips, are uniformly brash and scathing in their composition, harnessing the punkish energy of an act like earlier -(16)- and bringing it to harsher places altogether, while still — as the motor-ready riff of “In the Name of Freedom” demonstrates — keeping one foot in heavy rock traditions. Vocalist Ana Garcia Lopez is largely indecipherable in her throaty, rasping growls on opener “Daemonelix” and the subsequent “Raise Crows,” but “In the Name of Freedom” has a cleaner hook and closer “Sing for the Moon” brings in more atmospherics during its slower, more open-feeling verses, before crushing once more in a manner that’s — dare I say it? — progressive? Clearly more than just bludgeoning, then, but yes, plenty of that too.
While I’ll admit that Wooden Fields had me on board with the mere mention of the involvement of Siena Root bassist Sam Riffer, the Stockholm trio’s boogie-prone seven-song self-titled debut earns plenty of allegiance on its own, with vocalist/guitarist Sartez Faraj leading the classically-grooving procession in a manner that expands outward as it moves through the album’s tidy 38 minutes, taking the straight-ahead rush of “Read the Signs” and “Shiver and Shake” into the airier-but-still-grounded “Should We Care” before centerpiece “I’m Home” introduces a jammier vibe, drummer Fredrik Jansson Punkka (Witchcraft, etc.) seeming totally amenable to holding the track together beneath the extended solo. The transition works because no matter how far they go in “Don’t Be a Fool” or “Wind of Hope,” Wooden Fields never lose the thread of songcraft they weave throughout, and the melodies of closer “Endless Time” alone establish them as a group of marked potential, regardless of pedigree and the familiarity of their stylistic foundation.
Surging forth with lush progressive heavy psychedelic rock, Plaindrifter‘s debut full-length, Echo Therapy, showcases an awareness of the context in which it arrives — which is to say the German three-piece seem to be familiar with the aesthetic tropes they’re working toward. Still, although their emphasis on bringing together melody and heft may result in flashes of Elder in the extended “Prisma” or the closer “Digital Dreamcatcher” or Elephant Tree in “New World,” with opener “M.N.S.N.” making its impression as much with ambience as tonal weight and centerpiece “Proto Surfer Boy” sneakily executing its linear build in space-creating fashion before its long fadeout, there’s an individual presence in the material beyond a play toward style, and from what they offer here, it’s easy to imagine their forward-thinking course will lead to further manifest individualism in subsequent work. That may be me reading into the possibilities cast by the melodies of “M.N.S.N.” and in the quieter break of “Proto Surfer Boy,” but that’s plenty to go on and by no means the sum of Echo Therapy‘s achievements.
The kind of release that makes me want to own everything the band has done, Spawn‘s Live at Moonah Arts Collective enraptures with four tracks of meditative psychedelic flow, beginning with “Meditation in an Evil Temple” and oozing patiently through a cover of “Morning of the Earth” — from the 1971 Australian surf film of the same name — before “Remember to Be Here Now” issues that needed reminder to coincide with the drift that would otherwise so easily lead the mind elsewhere, and the 13-minute “All is Shiva” culminates with a spiritually-vibing wash of guitar, sitar, bass, drums, keyboard, tabla and tantric vocal repetitions. Based in Melbourne, the seven-maybe-more-piece outfit released a studio EP in 2018 on Nasoni Records (of course) and otherwise have a demo to their credit, but the with the sense of communion they bring to these songs, studio or live doesn’t matter anymore. At just under half an hour, it’s a short set — too short — but with the heavier ending of “All is Shiva,” there’s nothing they leave unsaid in that time. This is aural treasure. Pay heed.
Formed as a solo-project for Sterling DeWeese, the lo-fi experimentalist psych of Ambassador Hazy‘s Glacial Erratics first showed up in 2020 after four years of making, and with a 2021 vinyl release, the 14-track/39-minute offering would seem to be getting its due. DeWeese — sometimes on his own, sometimes backed by a full band or just drummer Jonathan Bennett — delights in the weird, finding a place somewhere between desert-style drift (his vocals remind at times of mellower Mario Lalli, but I doubt that’s more than coincidence), folk and space-indie on “Ain’t the Same No More,” which is somehow bluesy while the fuzzy “Lucky Clover” earlier taps alterna-chic bedroom gaze and the subsequent “Passing into a Grey Area” brings in full backing for the first time. Disjointed? Yeah, but it’s part of the whole idea, so don’t sweat it. No single song tops four minutes — the Dead Meadowy “Sleepyhead” comes closest at 3:51 — and it ends with “The World’s a Mess,” so yeah, DeWeese makes it easy enough to roll with what’s happening here. I’d suggest doing that.
A wildly ambitious debut — to the point of printing up a novella to flesh out its storyline and characters — The Birth of Billy Munro follows a narrative spearheaded by Mocaine guitarist/vocalist Amrit Mohan and is set in the American South following its title-character through a post-traumatic mental decay with material that runs a gamut from progressive metal to psychedelia to classic Southern heavy rock and grunge and so on. In just 43 minutes and with a host of dialogue-driven stretches — also samples like Alec Baldwin talking about his god complex from 1993’s Malice in the soon-to-be-churning “Narcissus” — the plot is brought to a conclusion on “The Bend,” which touches lighter acoustics and jazzy nuance without letting go entirely of the ’90s flair in “Psylocybin” a few tracks earlier, as far removed from the swaggering “Pistol Envy” as it seems to be, and in fact is. However deep the listener might want to explore, Mocaine seems ready to accommodate, and one only wonders whether the trio will explore further tales of Billy Munro or move on to other stories and concepts.
Toronto riffers Sun Below would like to be your entertainment for the evening, and they’d probably prefer it if you were also stoned. Their 71-minute self-titled debut long-player arrives after a series of three shorter offerings between 2018-2019, and after the opening “Chronwall Neanderhal,” the 14-minute “Holy Drifter” lets you know outright how it’s gonna go. They’re gonna vibe, they’re gonna jam, they’re gonna riff, and your brain’s gonna turn to goo and that’s just fine. Stoner is as stoner does, and whether that’s on a shorter track like “Shiva Sativa,” the shuffling “Kinetic Keif” and the rumbling “Doom Stick,” or the 18-minute “Twin Worlds” that follows ahead of the 12-minute closer “Solar Burnout,” one way or the other, you get gargantuan, post-Pike riffage that knows from whence its grooves come and doesn’t care it’s going to roll out an hour-plus anyway and steamroll lucidity in the process. Is that a bongrip at the end of “Solar Burnout” or the end of the world? More to the point, can’t it be both?
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 12th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Let’s assume that if the abiding image you’re giving your listenership is of an asteroid slamming into the surface of… something…, leaving a crater behind, you’re dealing one way or the other with some heavy shit. Thus it is with Low Orbit‘s Crater Creator, the Toronto trio’s first LP in four years since 2017’s Spacecake (review here), which will see release Nov. 19. Apparently that’s like one week from now? I have no idea what day, week, or month it is anymore. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the Gimme Metal show making me write down a date once a fortnight, I’d probably still think it was 2018.
You fucking wish, old man. Ha.
Anyway, Low Orbit have the title-track of the Ian Blurton-produced new album up now, and you should put some headphones on and listen. That’s how I did it anyway, and no regrets for the additional low-end punch my brain received all the more directly for doing so. Balancing that with vocal echoes ain’t exactly unheard of as a methodology for creating a sense of space, but damned if it doesn’t work.
Looking forward to the rest of the album. For now, the following:
Low Orbit – Crater Creator
Album release date: November 19, 2021
Low Orbit is happy to announce the release of their third studio album entitled, Crater Creator. Recorded at ProGold Studio in Toronto, Ontario Canada. Produced and engineered by Ian Blurton (Change of Heart, C’mon, Public Animal).
Album mastering was completed by Brad Boatright (Pentagram, Sleep, Monolord) of Audioseige in Portland, Oregon USA. Recorded “live off the floor” over three days in August 2020. Vocal, guitar and synth overdubs were added over another three day period. A limited number of Vinyl Records, Cd’s and Cassettes will be available for purchase. Downloads and streaming via all major outlets will be available as well.
Track List: Crater Creator (5:11) TARDIS (4:30) Sea of See (5:47) Empty Space (5:26) Monocle (5:00) Wormhole (4:06) Timelord (5:52)
Formed in 2013, LOW ORBIT emerged as the culmination of over twenty years experience in the Toronto hard rock, underground scene. The resulting birth is this power trio, who share a genuine passion for their craft, and who strive to play and create the heaviest music this side of the stratosphere.
