Let’s step out of time for a little bit. We’ll all take a collective breath, close our eyes, and imagine ourselves walking on a long path. It’s a long path lined with trees that leads to a beach and at the beach we’re totally alone. You can see planets up in the sky like big smiling faces and imagine the people there waving to you, far away. Far, far away. Distant, but big. You walk up and feel the change from the path to the sand under your feet, the looseness of the ground. There’s a breeze, because of course there is, and the sound of the water and the smell of salt and that ambient wetness that comes from being near the ocean. It feels like the place life came from, and it is.

We’re there and we’re all alone and it doesn’t matter because there are as many realities as we need to make these things happen and each one we inhabit is our own and we’re all there on this beach and we open our eyes and look out at the water. There’s however many suns you want, and the planets, and life, and water. Now imagine you’re there all by yourself and you realize you have something in your hand, and what is it?

You look down at your hand, right or left, maybe both, and you see you’re holding this lump. What is it? Oh wait, that’s bullshit. You remember now. You’re holding all your own bullshit. Look at that lump of bullshit. It’s been hanging out and festering and finally you got tired of all your own bullshit and you decided to take it for a walk and lose it once and for all. You take that lump of bullshit and you throw it as hard and as high as you can over the water and it sails like who knew bullshit could fly? But there it goes and it’s kind of fun to watch that big old lump of bullshit go higher and higher over the water until finally the arc crests and it starts to head down, far out and deep, past the continental shelf into the darker recesses of this infinite sea, and it’s so far gone by then that you don’t hear the splash but you still see it and then it’s done. All your bullshit, you just threw it away.

Maybe we all wash our hands in that sparkling water, salty but clean, and sit down for a while and just breathe in and out and tilt our heads back and close our eyes and feel the sun on our face. Maybe that’s what we do because there’s no more bullshit weighing us down and everything is beautiful around us and we don’t even have to look to know it, it’s just there and we can breathe it in and feel it in our lungs, feel the lungs take the oxygen out of the air and pump it through our blood, alone on this beach, the planets and suns and stars whatever all above, visible, shining impossibly, whatever. We’re all there, alone, breathing, living, no bullshit.

You open your eyes and look to either side of you. Maybe you’ve never felt this kind of freedom before, but now, your shoulders hanging natural and your breath coming easy, it’s there. You’re there. Everyone’s there. Nobody’s around.

—

Santa Cruz, California’s Mammatus released their self-titled debut in 2006 through Holy Mountain, Rocket Recordings and Leaf Hound Records, three labels the names of which alone should speak to the record’s essential nature. Comprised only of four songs, the record begins with “The Righteous Path Through the Forest of Old” (9:23) and moves through “The Outer Rim” (5:09) en route to “Dragon of the Deep Part One” (8:23) and “Dragon of the Deep Part Two” (22:12), the journey taking place enough of a preface for what’s become known as neo-psych that it renders the designation laughable. It’s not neo-anything. It’s out-of-time.

Comprised then of guitarist/vocalist Nicholas Emmert, drummer Aaron Emmert and bassist Chris Freels, with Zachery Patten and Mike Donofrio recording, Mammatus‘ initial explorations have become and well should be the stuff of cult psych legend. This record, its movement and progression between its songs, the way it sounds like one long stretch, a molten 45-minute flow broken into parts but united in its purpose and immersion just the same, is the stuff of should-be-worshiped-as-classic scorch. From the opening surf-in-space strum of “The Righteous Path Through the Forest of Old” through the bullshit-swallowing noisier reaches in the midsection breakdown of “Dragon of the Deep Part Two,” there is nothing so appropriate in the hearing of the album but to let go and trust the band to take you where they will because they’re going anyway.

Here we are, some 15 years after the fact and Mammatus‘ first still feels like it’s rolling through cosmic outer reaches inside the head. You want to call it hyperbole, fine. Your loss. This is an album for communion; both a preach to the converted and a call to convert. In the patient swirls of “The Outer Rim” there so much space tucked into just five minutes, and then “Dragon of the Deep Part One” adds even more feedback, overlapping feedback, before it launches into its own ultra-lysergic jam. What an album. What a band. Hot damn.

And you know “Dragon of the Deep Part Two” comes back from those open spaces in its middle. They bring it around to this massive fuzzy crunch, kick the slow wah and groove out huge in a before-Sleep-got-back-together paean to the power of rolling tone up and sharing the ensuing smoke. It’s all gorgeous and it all comes apart and gives way to noise like the universe spreading too wide and whoops, there goes the molecules that make up matter, cell walls breaking down and all that and what difference does it make anyhow we’ll just get another universe there are so many.

Mammatus. Mammatus. Live and breathe.

—

Thanks for reading. Hydrate. Watch your head. Have a great and safe weekend.

FRM.

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