Quarterly Review: Kal-El, The Ugly Kings, Guhts, Anunnaki, Bill Fisher, Seum, Spirit Adrift, Mutha Trucka, 3rd Ear Experience, Solarius
Posted in Reviews on September 28th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Everybody come through day one intact? I know it got pretty weird there for a minute, but I felt like sense was ultimately made. Maybe not in all cases, but definitely most. Today also gets fairly wild, and some of this stuff has been covered before in some fashion and some of it not so much, but hell, you’ve been through this before, as have I, so you know what to expect when you’re expecting. Blood might be spilled. Bruises left. Or bliss. Or both sometimes. Hell’s bells. Let’s go already.
Quarterly Review #11-20:
Kal-El, Dark Majesty
With their fifth full-length, Dark Majesty, Norwegian heavy rockers and sci-fi-themed cleavage aficionados Kal-El make a willful play toward the epic. Their first 2LP and their first album for Majestic Mountain Records, the eight-song offering tops 65 minutes and splits into four two-song sides, each one seeming to grow bigger until the last of them, with the closing duo “Kala Mishaa” and “Vimana,” draws the proceedings to a massive close. Along the way, Kal-El not only offer their most melodically rich and spacious fare to-date — opening with their longest track in the 11:39 “Temple” (immediate points) — but blast Kyuss into the cosmos on the four-minute “Spiral,” and give Dozer a run for their money on “Comêta.” Gargantuan fuzz shines through on “Hyperion” in a near-maddening cacophony, but it might be the title-track that’s the greatest highlight in the end, marking the band’s accomplishment in heft, blending riffs and atmosphere to a broad and engaging degree. It is a triumph and it sounds like one.
Majestic Mountain Records webstore
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The Ugly Kings, Strange, Strange Times
One would not accuse Melbourne’s The Ugly Kings of inaccuracy in titling their second album Strange, Strange Times, and though they launch with the post-Queens of the Stone Age title-track and the now-tinged cynicism of “Technodrone” and “Do You Feel Like You’re Paranoid?,” it’s in even moodier stretches like “Last Man Left Alive” they cast their lot toward individualism. Songs vary in intention but remain consistent in the quality of their construction and look-at-the-world-around-you theme, with “Lawman” leaning toward darker country blues, “Mr. Hyde” asking what would happen if Clutch and Ruff Majik ever crossed paths and the finale “Another Fucking Day” offering a deceptively immersive unfurling. I can’t help but wonder if The Ugly Kings feel surrounded in their home city by much, much druggier neo-psych acts in the heavy underground scene, but the clarity of purpose they bring to their songwriting would make them a standout one way or the other.
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Guhts, Blood Feather
Atmospheric and seething in kind, Guhts brings together members of New Yorkers Witchkiss and North Carolina’s Black Mountain Hunger for a pandemic-era debut release that in style explores the restlessness and the overwhelming nature of the age. With Amber Burns (interview here) on vocals, the drums programmed behind Scott Prater and Dan Shaneyfelt guitars/synths and the bass of Jesse Van Note, and a purpose wrought in immersion, the band distinguishes itself in its apropos grimness and in the potential for future exploration of the ideas laid out here, bordering in “The Mirror” on goth only after “Handless Maiden” offers raging, post-metallic lumber. One wonders how Blood Feather will sound five years from now, but more to the point, one wonders what Guhts might conjure in the meantime when/if they press forward. Either way, expect to see this on the list of 2021’s best short releases.
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Anunnaki, Martyr of Alexandria
Hey there, psych fans and experts on tragedies of the classic world, British Columbia two-piece Anunnaki have the psychedelic instrumental blowout themed around the murder of Hypatia you’ve been waiting for! Never heard of Hypatia? It doesn’t matter. Samples will provide some context and if they said the whole thing was about going shoe shopping, it wouldn’t be any less righteously far out. With “Golden Gate of the Sun” at the outset, the duo of Dave Read (guitar/bass) and Arlen Thompson (drums/synth) prime a bit of space-boogie, but the subsequent “Cyril, the Fanatic” shoves the freakery to the fore with wailing guitar and drones and seemingly whatever else they thought might work and does. The 15-minute finale, “The Cries of Hypatia,” dives deeper into drone, holding back the drums for about seven minutes while obscure speech and the titular cries unfold. Read and Thompson build it to a full, suitably deathly wash, and take the time to end minimal. Literary, arthouse, but not at all stale for that.
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Bill Fisher, Hallucinations of a Higher Truth
A departure even from his departure, Church of the Cosmic Skull bandleader Bill Fisher‘s second solo offering, Hallucinations of a Higher Truth, follows the darker progressive rock of 2020’s Mass Hypnosis and the Dark Triad (review here) with 40-plus minutes of piano-led singer-songwriter fare, taking a stated influence from the lyrics-as-everyday-musings of Randy Newman on songs like “Better Than You” and “Off to Work,” while revamping his main outfit’s “Answers in Your Soul” and “Evil in Your Eye” to suit the arrangement theme. As Fisher has engaged plenty with classic forms in his work, Hallucinations of a Higher Truth feels by no means beyond his creative reach, and he’s an accomplished enough songwriter and performer to pull it off, thereby demonstrating that if you can craft a song you can make it do whatever the hell you want, and that “you” in this case is him. This isn’t going to be everybody’s thing, but Fisher carries it ably.
Church of the Cosmic Skull website
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Seum, Live From the Seum-Cave
Montreal low-end filthmongers Seum return to follow-up earlier 2021’s Winterized EP (review here) with Live From the Seum-Cave, basking in an even rawer incarnation of their guitars-need-not-apply drum/bass/vocals attack. “Sea Sick Six” is even nastier here than it was on the last EP, and the eponymous opener “Seum” is an anthem of disaffection that finds its lyrical answer in “Life Grinder” and “Blueberry Cash” alike — the why-do-I-even-have-this-shit-job point of view as unmistakable as the throat-singing that pops up in the aforementioned “Sea Sick Six.” The trio are beastly on “Winter of Seum,” and they make a special highlight of “Super Tanker” from 2020’s Summer of Seum EP, working tempo shifts into the punishing march that are less than predictable and yet totally over the top in their extremity. This is a good band who genuinely sound like they don’t give a fuck. That’s a hard thing to make believable. I hope they never put out a record and do EPs forever.
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Spirit Adrift, Forge Your Future
Spirit Adrift have broken out from the doomly mire to proffer clear-headed, soaring traditional heavy metal. The unit, led as ever by guitarist/bassist/vocalist Nate Garrett with Marcus Bryant on drums, offer three new tracks on Forge Your Future in the title-track, “Wake Up” and “Invisible Enemy,” channeling Randy Rhoads even through more denser tonality and the nodding groove of the last. Echo behind Garrett‘s vocals reminds here and there of Brian “Butch” Balich of Penance/Argus, but Spirit Adrift‘s path across four full-lengths and companion short releases like this one over the last six years has been its own, and the emergence of Garrett as a singer has been a crucial part of making these songs the concise epics they are. Crisp in craft and confident in delivery, Spirit Adrift only sound like masters of their domain here, and so they are. Heavy metal that loves heavy metal.
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Mutha Trucka, Mutha Trucka
The Chicago-based three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Eric Ervin, bassist/vocalist Dana “Erv” Ervin and drummer/backing vocalist Ted Sciaky plunge deep with their self-titled debut into the ’90s era of heavy rock, with vibes running between C.O.C., Monster Magnet, Clutch and Kyuss, among others, but there’s a might-throw-elbows spirit that comes through even in willfully spacious pieces like “I’m Free” (some Lemmy influence there too) and “Wizards & Gods” that adds aggro spirit to the bulk of the nine-song/39-minute affair, a piece like “D.B. Blues” — which stands for “Dirty Bitch Blues” — as unpretentious in its overarching style as it is politically incorrect. “Fogginess” hits near eight minutes and moves toward the trippier end of grunge, with one of the outing’s many layered solos playing out amid the solid groove beneath, the band refusing to compromise their abiding lack of pretense even in the face of that which would otherwise be psychedelic. Not much time for that nonsense — there’s crunch to be had.
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3rd Ear Experience, Danny Frankel’s 3rd Ear Experience
Who’s Danny Frankel? Long story short, he was Lou Reed‘s drummer, but in fact he’s got a session-player career that’s found him performing with a staggering array of artists and bands. He puts his stamp on his very own 3rd Ear Experience alongside the group’s founding guitarist Robbi Robb as well as a host of others including fellow founder AmritaKripa, synthesist Scott “Dr. Space” Heller and more besides. The resulting journey is six tracks and 63 minutes of psychedelic gloryscaping, desert-born but galaxy-bred, with longform works like “What Are Their Names” (18:18), “Weep No More, My Friend” (14:49) and closer “Timelessness Pt. 2” (12:03) expanding across exploratory and fluid movements offset by shorter stretches like the suitably percussive “Cosmos Glazed Elephant.” In opener “A Beautiful Questions,” the drums hardly feature, but the lead-in for “What Are Their Names” feels no less intentional than when the penultimate “Timelessness Pt. 1” gives way to silence ahead of the beginning of the finale. I’d say more, but I seem to have lost my train of hyperbole-laden praise. Wonderfully so.
3rd Ear Experience on Facebook
Space Rock Productions website
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Solarius, Universal Trial
Originally recorded in 2006, Solarius‘s heretofore unreleased four-song EP, Universal Trial, is notable for predating the self-titled Graveyard album, as guitarist/vocalist Jonatan Ramm would end up joining that band in 2008, seeming after Solarius dissolved. The 21-minute release arrives now with the considerable backing of Heavy Psych Sounds in no small part because of that nifty bit of context, and the classic-style boogie wrought in “Sky of Mine” is enough to make it a prescient-feeling footnote in the storied history of Swedish retroism, let alone the brooding-into-surging, organ-laced “Into the Sun,” which if it was issued by a new band this week would be an excuse unto itself for Bandcamp Friday. Wrapped in the shuffling title-track at the start and the harmonized, patiently-drawn “Mother Nature Mind” at the end, Universal Trial feels like a lesson in the essential role of producer Don Alsterberg (Graveyard, Blues Pills, Spiders, etc.) in defining the style as well as in what might’ve been if Solarius had put this out at the time.
Heavy Psych Sounds on Facebook
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