Some context required. The common thread between Tomoyuki Trio and Modoki, who are also a trio but apparently didn’t want to advertise, is guitarist Mike Vest and drummer Dave Sneddon. Based in the UK, Vest also mixes here and might be recognized from any number of mostly experimentalist doom-drone and cosmic projects/collaborations, including BONG, Blown Out, Artifacts and Uranium, Drunk in Hell, Ozo, 11Paranoias, etc. (an offering from his Kaliyuga Express project was just announced for October), while Sneddon, in addition to running Flat Earth Records, has played in various punk bands going back to the early 1980s, including Blood Robots, Generic, Boxed In, and the Vest-inclusive collab Mienakunaru for their first two albums.

The go-anywhere lysergic off-the-cuffism of Mienakunaru is a decent place to start understanding Tomoyuki Trio‘s five-song/39-minute debut, Mars and Modoki‘s concurrently-issued eight-song/36-minute second album, Luna to Phobos, but Vest and Sneddon are not the only common elements. Both are released through Riot Season Records (on the same day, no less), both were mastered by John McBain, and both are remote collaborations with Japanese psych guitarists, Modoki featuring Mitsuru Tabata (Zeni Geva and Acid Mothers Temple, among others), and Tomoyuki Trio taking its name from Up-Tight guitarist Tomoyuki Aoki, who also contributes the only vocals to Mars on 15-minute opener and longest track (immediate points) “Voiceless Cry” and who in the gamma-radiation guitar howl in “Metagalactic” freely demonstrates what happens when you arrive after setting controls for the heart of the sun. You incinerate.

With Vest and Sneddon recording in the UK and Tomoyuki in Japan, Mars was clearly built remotely, but that does nothing to hinder its sense of reach. “Voiceless Cry” even dares some vocals as it oozes and churns through its first half, and the wailing solos on guitar set up the more forward riff of “Transcendentem,” which becomes the bed for another lead as the instrumental procession unfolds. There are hints of space and garage and both come into further bloom on “Metagalactic,” but it’s an unimaginably big infinity out there and even between here and Mars there’s plenty to explore, so Vest, Tomoyuki and Sneddon set themselves to that task. “Universum” slows the movement and (while we’re touring the solar system) is like an ice volcano on the moon Enceladus in its somehow molten, definitely frozen lurch, or maybe, on Mars, like staring down into the Valles Marineris, or looking up from the foot of Olympus Mons. Large, stark and otherworldly. By its last minute-plus, it is noise, and that feels appropriate.

Mars capper “Aether” seems to pick up from similar noise but it’s not a direct bleed. Still, the feeling of diving back in from whence one just came is palpable, and the 3:26 of “Aether” is a dark trip-out. After about a minute, it happens into a solo section that reminds of Earthless if they were into ’60s jazz instead of ’70s rock, and the wash of noise returns on the other side to give Mars the avant garde finish it deserves. “Aether” is about half again as short as the next shortest track, so it’s an outlier on Mars, but Luna to Phobos, with Sneddon, Vest and Mitsuru Tabata operating as Modoki, is shorter on the per-piece average.

Part of that might be the effect of having an album already to their credit and being more solidified in their approach, but the two records were reportedly made at more or less the same time, and calling anything on Modoki‘s sophomore LP solid seems like a bit of a misnomer, since although Earth’s moon and Phobos — which alongside Deimos is one of Mars’ two natural satellites, probably captured from the asteroid belt however many millions or billions of years ago — are both rocky formations, there’s an awful lot in opener “Sick Starliner,” “Mud River,” “Those Disruptors” and the half-speed-Hawkwindian volume surge of the title-track that feels more like subsurface magma heating, melting and cooling, turning rock to liquid and liquid to rock in a convective exchange that creates new compounds and conglomerates — the stuff of stirring planets. A raw, organic, contained violence.

One that grows broad in “Non Telepaths” amid piercing synth noise, casts early psych in its own image in “Multiplied From the Old Days,” and lumbers through weirdo noisemaking in “Benefit of Control” before the eight-minute closer/longest track “Zenith” takes airy float and lets it (d)evolve into a careening charge marked by rising synthesizer and the kind of gravity that leads to total dug-in-itude and a dizzying dreaminess. They do eventually reach what would seem to be the titular zenith, and just past eight minutes in, they seem to let the song go to end it, having arrived at their mark and seemingly accomplished what they set out to do in getting there. Modoki‘s cuts feel more structured, but that might honestly be because they’re shorter than Tomoyuki Trio‘s, but putting the two albums next to each other reveals fascinating differences of personality between them, highlighting the character at play in the respective performances of Tomoyuki and Mitsuru.

It should probably go without saying that something shared between Luna to Phobos and Mars is their extremity. Whether you’re listening to them both together, each on its own, whatever, Tomoyuki Trio and Modoki are both putting a challenge before the listener and before conventional craft. At the most basic level, yeah, this is rock music — guitar, bass, drums, synth, keys, occasional vocals, etc. — but it’s been deconstructed and repurposed to suit these expansive, on-their-own-wavelength ends. It is not accessible or overly friendly. At moments either of these collections can be downright harsh, but both resonate with intention.

I won’t claim to know how Mars or Luna to Phobos was pieced together, but whatever that process was, the parties involved — that’s Vest/Sneddon and Mitsuru and the same pair and Tomoyuki — have found a means to convey a whole-group dynamic and, more impressively, embarked on developing a chemistry without being in the same room. That Modoki and Tomoyuki Trio both gel as well as they do is a credit to the open nature of the creative impulses launching them.

Modoki, Luna to Phobos (2023)

Tomoyuki Trio, Mars (2023)

Mike Vest on Bandcamp (55% off code: sale)

Tomoyuki Trio on Facebook

Modoki on Facebook

Riot Season Records on Facebook

Riot Season Records on Instagram

Riot Season Records on Bandcamp

Riot Season Records website

[PLEASE NOTE: This tour is canceled as of Aug. 21.]

I have nothing but a particularly punk rock respect for this kind of tour. Here’s a band, Dunes, venturing across the Atlantic for the first time. Not entirely unknown in the crowded UK heavy sphere — their Gargoyle full-length came out last year, you can stream it below, neither are they ultra high-profile or preceded by a glut of hype. They’re a band hitting the road, rolling the dice on going somewhere new to make friends, probably lose money, play killer shows and make memories that will last the rest of their lives, one way or the other, and most realistically, both. This is a kind of heavy rock ideal, and for an act who gets a chance like this to take advantage as Dunes are is encouraging to see. I don’t know them personally at all, but I’m stoked on their tour and I hope it’s killer for them.

Dunes played Desertfest London last year and are confirmed for Ripplefest Texas, where this tour will end after kicking off at Desertfest NYC. Club dates between two fest appearances on a week-plus foray into foreign soil? This is the kind of thing American bands dream of doing in Europe and the kind of thing European bands dream of doing in America until they get here and live first-hand how most acts are treated on the road here. In any case, it will likely be a formative experience for the band as they move forward after. At very least, they’re gonna have new friends and stories to tell afterward.

They posted the following on social media, and I’ll throw may hat in and wish them the best for the run and say that, if they have the art below on a shirt at Desertfest New York, I’ll pick that up to support regardless of whether they’ve got middle-aged-belly sizes or not. Here you go:

(#127482#)(#127474#) *DUNES USA TOUR 2023* (#127482#)(#127474#)

Very excited to announce that we’re going to be doing a US tour in September!

We’re kicking off at the legendary Desertfest NYC in New York and working our way down to the equally incredible RippleFest Texas in Austin.

We’re going to be touring with Texan legends Red Beard Wall huge love, hails, shouts and horns to Aaron from Red Beard Wall who’s helped us out BIG time putting these dates together, cannot wait to tear it up together.

14-16/09 New York, NY @DesertfestNYC
16/09 Richmond, VA @banditoslounge.rva
17/09 Asheville, NC @fleetwoodsavl
18/09 Atlanta, GA @badearl
20/09 New Orleans, LA @santosbarnola
21/09 Houston, TX @the_end_houston
22-24/09 Austin, TX @ripplefesttexas

Also gotta give a big, big shouts and thanks to Ryan from Lick Of My Spoon Productions / @ripplefesttexas / High Desert Queen for having us on Ripplefest Texas which is where this tour spawned from, cannot wait to get over there and see those mint HDQ folks again ❤️(#129312#)

And while we’re on it cheers to the folks at Desertscene London / Desertfest London n for having us play their New York fest AND Phil Hey from Psychlona who’s given us tons of guidance, advice, warnings and inspiration about getting over and going over to the US (#128588#)

We’ll be joining some great bands on the festivals and gigs while we’re over there as well, cannot wait to get over there to make some noise, meet some old friends and make some new ones (#127867#)

Big love as always to @stevenyoyada for creating this class artwork, you can expect to see it on a t-shirt in the not too distant future, probably.

https://www.facebook.com/dunesNCL/
https://instagram.com/dunesncl
https://dunesncl.bandcamp.com/
https://linktr.ee/Dunes_ncl

https://music.sapienrecords.com/

Dunes, Gargoyle (2022)

Hope you had a good weekend. Hope your bank account survived Bandcamp Friday. I gotta admit, I hit it a little hard, made four $10-plus purchases. A certain rainforest-named mega-corporate everything-distro site has me out of the habit of thinking of paying for shipping, but that comes back to bite you. And if there’s a tape or a CD and the download costs $7 and the tape costs $10 and comes with the download too, what would you have me do? Throw another five or six bucks in there for shipping and that adds up. Still, for a good cause, which is of course supporting bands nd labels who make and promote killer stuff. I don’t mind that.

We’ve arrived at the next to last day of the Fall 2021 Quarterly Review. It’s a cool one, I hope you’ll agree. If not, maybe tomorrow.

Quarterly Review #51-60:

Hour of 13, Black Magick Rites

The history of Hour of 13, 14 years on from their self-titled debut (discussed here) is complex and full of comings and goings. With Black Magick Rites — which was posted for a day in Nov. 2020 and then removed from the public sphere until this Shadow Kingdom release — founding multi-instrumentalist Chad Davis takes over vocal duties as well, charting the way forward for the band as a complete solo-project with seven songs and 43 minutes of lower-fi classic-style doom that bears in its title track some semblance of garage mentality but avoids most of the modern trappings such a designation implies. Satan features heavily, as one would expect. “House of Death” leans on its chorus hard, but opener “His Majesty of the Wood” and the eight-minute “Within the Pentagram,” as well as the payoff of closer “The Mystical Hall of Dreams” seem to show where the long-tumultuous outfit could be headed melodically and in grimly grandiose style if Davis — also of The Crooked Whispers, The Sabbathian, countless others in a variety of styles — wills it. Here’s hoping.

Hour of 13 on Bandcamp

Shadow Kingdom Records website

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Skepticism, Companion

Graceful death. 30 years later, one might expect no less from Finnish funeral doom progenitors than that, and it’s exactly what they bring to the six-song/48-minute Companion. “Calla” sets the tempo for what follows at a dirge march with keyboard adding melodies to the procession as “The Intertwined” continues the slow roll, with drums and piano taking over in the midsection before the full brunt is borne again. “The March of the Four” follows with church organ running alongside the drawn-out guitar movement, each hit of the kick drum somehow forlorn beneath the overlaid growls. At least superficially, this is the Skepticism one imagines: slow, mournful, beauty-in-darkness, making dirty sounds but emerging without a stain on their formalwear. Closer “The Swan and the Raven” is a triumph in this, a revelry-that-isn’t, and “Passage” and even gives the tempo a relative kick, but that and the consuming drama of “The Inevitable” feel within the band’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Or their mortuary, anyhow. Honestly, they know what they’re doing, they’ve done it for a long time, and they don’t release records that often, so there’s an element of novelty just to the fact that the album exists, but if you put on Companion and listen to it, they also sound like they’re taking an entire genre to school. A genre they helped define, no less.

Skepticism on Facebook

Svart Records website

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Count Raven, The Sixth Storm

Long-running Swedish doom traditionalists Count Raven are in immediate conversation with their own classic era with the album title The Sixth Storm serving as a reference to their 1990 debut, Storm Warning. Indeed, it is their sixth full-length, and it makes up for the decade-plus it’s been since they were last heard from with a 73-minute, all-in nine-track assemblage of oldschool Sabbathian doom metal, tinged with classic heavy rock and a broader vision that picks up where 2009’s Mammons War left off in epics like “The Nephilims” and “Oden,” the latter the album’s apex ahead of the Ozzy-ish piano/keyboard ballad “Goodbye” following on from the earlier “Heaven’s Door.” Some contemplation of mortality perhaps from founding guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist Dan “Fodde” Fondelius to go with the more socially themed “The Giver and the Taker,” “Baltic Storm,” opener “Blood Pope” or even “Oden,” which bases itself around Christianity’s destruction of pagan culture. Fair enough. Classic doom spearheaded by a guy who’s been at it for more than three decades. No revolution in style, but if you’d begrudge Count Raven their first album in 12 years, why?

Count Raven on Facebook

I Hate Records website

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Owl Cave, Broken Speech

Something for everyone in Owl Cave‘s Broken Speech, at least so long as your vision of “everyone” just includes fans of various extreme metallic styles. The Parisian one-man outfit’s debut release arrives as a single 43-minute track, led off by the sample “your silence speaks volumes.” What unfolds from there is a linear progression of movements through which S. — the lone party responsible for the guitar, bass, drum programming and other sampling, as there are obscure bits that might be manipulated voices and so on — weaves progressive black metal, doom, industrial churn, noise rock and other genre elements together with a willful sense of experimentalism and uniting heft. Some stretches are abrasive, some are nearly empty, some guitar-led, some more percussive, but even at its most raging, “Broken Speech” holds to its overarching atmosphere, grim as it is, and that allows it to ponder with scorn and melancholy alike before finishing out with a cacophony of blasts and wash leading to a last residual drone.

Owl Cave on Facebook

Time Tombs Production webstore

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Zeup, Blind

Sharply executed, uptempo heavy/desert-style rock in the Californian tradition as filtered through a European legacy of bands that spans no less an amount of time, Zeup‘s second EP, Blind, is an in-and-out kind of affair. Four songs, 17 minutes. They’re not looking to take up too much of your day. But the energy they bring to that time, whether it’s the swinging bassline in “Belief” or the initial jolt of “Illusions,” the rolling catchiness of “Who You Are” or the closing title-track’s more Sabbath-spirited stomp, is organic, full, and sincere. In terms of style, the Copenhagen three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Jakob Bach, bassist/backing vocalist Morten Rold and drummer Morten Barth aren’t trying to get away with convincing anybody they invented heavy rock and roll, but the stamp they put on their own songs is welcome right up to the capper solo on “Blind” itself. Familiar, but crisp and refreshing like cold beer on a hot day, if that’s your thing.

Zeup website

Zeup on Bandcamp

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Dark Bird, Out of Line

A drift calls you forward as Dark Bird‘s fourth album (amid many short releases and experimentalist whathaveyous), Out of Line, begins with “And it All Ends Well” and its title-track, the Toronto-based Roan Bateman pushing outward melodically before adding more fuzz to the shroom-folk of “Stranger,” an underlying sense of march telling of the made-in-dark-times spirit that so much of the record seems to actively work against. “Down With Love” is a dream given shimmer in its strum and no less ethereal when the maybe-programmed drums start, and “Undone” is the bummed-out-with-self ’90s-lysergic harmony that you never heard at the time but should have. So it goes en route to the buzzing finale “This is It,” with “Minefied” echoing “Out of Line” with a vibe like Masters of Reality at their most ethereal, “With You” making a late highlight of its underlying organ drone and the vocals that top it in the second half, and “The Ghost” somehow turning Western blues despite, no, not at all doing that thing. 43 minutes of a world I’d rather live in.

Dark Bird on Facebook

NoiseAgonyMayhem website

Cardinal Fuzz webstore

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Hope Hole, Death Can Change

I’m not saying they don’t still have growing to do or work ahead of them in carving out their own approach from the elements their self-released debut album, Death Can Change, puts to work across its nine songs, but I am definitely saying that the Toledo, Ohio, duo of M.A. Snyder and Mike Mullholand, who’ve dubbed their project Hope Hole, are starting out in an admirable place. Throughout a vinyl-ready 37 minutes that makes a centerpiece of the roughed up The Cure cover “Kyoto Song,” the two-piece bridge sludged nod, classic heavy rock, progressive doom ambience, stonerly awareness — see “Cisneros’ Lament” — and a healthy dose of organ to result in a genre-blender sound that both chases individuality and manifests it in rudimentary form, perhaps arriving at some more melodic cohesion in the of-its-era closer “Burning Lungs” after rougher-edged processions, but even there not necessarily accounting for the full scope of the rest of the songs enough to be a full summary. The songs are there, though, and as Hope Hole continue to chase these demons, that will be the foundation of their progress.

Hope Hole on Facebook

Hope Hole on Bandcamp

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Smote, Drommon

Newcastle, UK, weirdo solo-outfit Smote released the two-part Drommon concurrent to March 2021’s Bodkin (review here), with tapes sold out from Base Materialism, and Rocket Recordings now steps in for a vinyl issue with two additional tracks splitting up the two-part title-cut, each piece of which runs just on either side of 16 minutes long. Drones and acid folk instrumentation, acoustics, sitars, electrified swirl — all of these come together in purposeful passion to create the textures of “Dommon (Part 1)” and “Drommon (Part 2),” and though it feels more directed with the complementary “Hauberk” and “Poleyn” included, the album’s experimental heart is well intact. Smote will make a stage debut next month, apparently as a four-piece around founder Daniel Foggin, so how that might play into the future of Smote as a full band in the studio remains to be seen. Drommon serves as argument heavily in favor of finding out.

Smote on Instagram

Rocket Recordings on Bandcamp

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Gristmill, Heavy Everything

East Coast dudes playing West Coast noise, it may well be that Gristmill deserve points right off the bat on their debut long-player, Heavy Everything, both for the title and for avoiding the trap of sounding like Unsane that defines so, so, so much of Atlantic Seaboard noise rock. They’re too aggro in their delivery to be straight-up doom, but the slower crawl of guitar in “Remains Nameless” and “Glass Door” adds depth to the pounding delivered by the initial salvo of “Mitch,” “Mute” and “Irony,” but the punch of the bass throughout is unmistakable, and though I can’t help be reminded in listening about that time Seattle’s Akimbo went and wrote a record based in my beloved Garden State, the drawn-out roll of “Stone Rodeo” and final nod-into-chug in “Loon” show readiness to encompass something beyond the raw scathe in their work. Yeah, if they wanted to put out like six or seven albums that sound just like this over the next 15 or so years, I’d probably be on board for that for the meanness and more of this debut.

Gristmill on Instagram

Gristmill on Bandcamp

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Ivory Primarch, As All Life Burns

This is a satisfying meat grinder in which to plunge one’s face for about an hour. A Buschemi-chipper. A powdering-of-bone that begins with the lurching of longest track (immediate points) “The Masque” — beginning with an acid-test sample, no less — and moving through “Gleancrawler” and the faster-for-a-while-but-still-probably-slower-than-you’re-thinking title-track, having just consumed half an hour of your life and a little of your soul. Hyperbole? Of course. But these are extreme sounds and extreme times, so fuck it. Melbourne duo Ivory Primarch, throughout As All Life Burns, demonstrate precious little regard for whatever standard of decency one might apply, and the deathly, fetid “Keeper of Secrets” and the keyboard-laced “Aetherbeast” — seeming to answer back to the opener — are self-aware enough to be willful in that, not to mention the fact that they top off with the noise-drone of “Aftermath,” as if to survey the devastation they just wrought, mangled and duly bludgeoned. Nothing sounds cruel enough? Try this.

Ivory Primarch on Facebook

Cursed Monk Records on Bandcamp

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Third day, and you know what that means. Today we hit and pass the halfway mark of this Quarterly Review. I won’t say it hasn’t been work, but it seems like every time I do one of these lately I continue to be astounded by how much easier writing about good stuff makes it. I must’ve done a real clunker like two years ago or something. Can’t think of one, but wow, it’s way more fun when the tunes are killer.

To that end we start with Dopelord today, haha. Have fun digging through if you do.

Quarterly Review #21-30:

Dopelord, Reality Dagger

They put it in a 12″, and that’s cool, but in addition to the fact that it’s about 22 minutes long, something about Reality Dagger, the latest EP from Poland’s Dopelord, strikes me as being really 10″ worthy. I know 10″ is the bastard son of vinyl pressings — doesn’t fit with your LPs and doesn’t fit with your 7″s. They’re a nuisance. Do they get their own shelf? Mixed in throughout? Well, however you organize them, I think a limited 10″ of Reality Dagger would be perfect, because from the melodies strewn throughout “Dark Coils” and the wildly catchy “Your Blood” — maybe the most complex vocal arrangement I’ve yet heard from the band — to the ultra-sludge interplay with screams on the 10-minute closing title-track, it sounds to me like standing out from the crowd is exactly what Dopelord want to do. They want to be that band that doesn’t fit your preconceptions of stoner-doom, or sludge, or modern heavy largesse in the post-Monolord vein. Why not match that admirable drive in format? Oh hell, you know what? I’ll just by the CD and have done with it. One of the best EPs I’ve heard this year.

Dopelord on Facebook

Dopelord on Bandcamp

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Scorched Oak, Withering Earth

Don’t be surprised when you see Kozmik Artifactz, Nasoni Records, or some other respected probably-European purveyor of heavy coming through with an announcement they’ve picked up Scorched Oak. The Dortmund, Germany, trio seem to have taken the last few years to figure out where they were headed — they pared down from a five-piece, for example — and their rolling tides of fuzz on late-2020’s debut LP Withering Earth bears the fruit of those efforts. Aesthetically and structurally sound, it’s able to touch on heavy blues, metal and drifting psychedelia all within the span of a seven-minute track like “Swamp,” and in its five-songs running shortest to longest, it effectively draws the listener deeper into the world the band are creating through dual vocals, patient craft and spacious production. If I was a label, I’d sign them for the bass tone on 14-minute closer “Desert” alone, never mind any of the other natural phenomena they portray throughout the record, which is perhaps grim in theme but nonetheless brimming with potential. Some cool riffs on this dying planet.

Scorched Oak on Facebook

Scorched Oak on Bandcamp

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Kings of the Fucking Sea, In Concert

A scorching set culled from two nights of performances in their native Nashville, what’s essentially serving as Kings of the Fucking Sea‘s debut long-player, In Concert, is a paean to raw psychedelic power trio worship. High order ripper groove pervades “Witch Mountain” and the wasn’t-yet-named “Hiding No More” — which was introduced tentatively as “Death Dealer,” which the following track is actually titled. Disorienting? Shit yeah it is. And shove all the poignancy of making a live album in Feb. 2020 ahead of the pandemic blah blah. That’s not what’s happening here. This is all about blow-the-door-so-we-can-escape psychedelic pull and thrust. One gets the sense that Kings of the Fucking Sea are more in control than they let on, but they play it fast and loose and slow and loose throughout In Concert and by the time the mellower jam in “I Walk Alone” opens up to the garage-style wash of crash cymbal ahead of closer “The Nile Song,” the swirling fuckall that ensues is rampant with noise-coated fire. A show that might make you look up from your phone. So cool it might be jazz. I gotta think about it.

Kings of the Fucking Sea on Facebook

Agitated Records on Bandcamp

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Mantarraya, Mantarraya

They bill themselves as ‘Mantarraya – power trío,’ and guitarist/vocalist Herman Robles Montero, drummer/maybe-harmonica-ist Kelvin Sifuentes Pérez and bassist/vocalist Enzo Silva Agurto certainly live up to that standard on their late-2020 self-titled debut full-length. The vibe is classic heavy ’70s through and through, and the Peruvian three-piece roll and boogie through the 11 assembled tracks with fervent bluesy swing on “En el Fondo” and no shortage of shuffle throughout the nine-minute “120 Años (Color),” which comes paired with the trippier “Almendrados” in what seems like a purposeful nod to the more out-there among the out there, bringing things back around to finish swinging and bouncing on the eponymous closer. I’ll take the classic boogie as it comes, and Mantarraya do it well, basking in a natural but not too purposefully so sense of underproduction while getting their point across in encouraging-first-record fashion. At over an hour long, it’s too much for a single LP, but plenty of time for them to get their bearings as they begin their creative journey.

Mantarraya on Facebook

Mantarraya on Bandcamp

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Häxmästaren, Sol i Exil

At the risk of repeating myself, someone’s gonna sign Häxmästaren. You can just tell. The Swedish five-piece’s second album, Sol i Exil (“sun in exile,” in English), is a mélange of heavy rock and classic doom influences, blurring the lines between microgenres en route to an individual approach that’s still accessible enough in a riffer like “Millennium Phenomenon” or “Dödskult Ritual” to be immediately familiar and telegraph to the converted where the band are coming from. Vocalist Niklas Ekwall — any relation to Magnus from The Quill? — mixes in some screams and growls to his melodic style, further broadening the palette and adding an edge of extremity to “Children of the Mountain,” while “Growing Horns” and the capper title-track vibe out with with a more classic feel, whatever gutturalisms happen along the way, the latter feeling like a bonus for being in Swedish. In the ever-fertile creative ground that is Gothenburg, it should be no surprise to find a band like this flourishing, but fortunately Sol i Exil doesn’t have to be a surprise to kick ass.

Häxmästaren on Facebook

Häxmästaren on Bandcamp

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Shiva the Destructor, Find the Others

Launching with the nine-minute instrumental “Benares” is a telling way for Kyiv’s Shiva the Destructor to begin their debut LP, since it immediately sets listener immersion as their priority. The five-track/44-minute album isn’t short on it, either, and with the band’s progressive, meditative psychedelic style, each song unfolds in its own way and in its own time, drawn together through warmth of tone and periods of heft and spaciousness on “Hydronaut” and a bit of playful bounce on “Summer of Love” (someone in this band likes reggae) and a Middle Eastern turn on “Ishtar” before “Nirvana Beach” seems to use the lyrics to describe what’s happening in the music itself before cutting off suddenly at the end. Vocals stand alone or in harmony and the double-guitar four-piece bask in a sunshine-coated sound that’s inviting and hypnotic in kind, offering turns enough to keep their audience following along and undulations that are duly a clarion to the ‘others’ referenced in the title. It’s like a call to prayer for weirdo psych heads. I’ll take that and hope for more to come.

Shiva the Destructor on Facebook

Robustfellow Productions on Bandcamp

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Amammoth, The Fire Above

The first and only lyric in “Heal” — the opening track of Sydney, Australia, trio Amammoth‘s debut album, The Fire Above — is the word “marijuana.” It doesn’t get any less stoned from there. Riffs come in massive waves, and even as “The Sun” digs into a bit of sludge, the largesse and crash remains thoroughly weedian, with the lumbering “Shadows” closing out the first half of the LP with particularly Sleep-y nod. Rawer shouted vocals also recall earlier Sleep, but something in Amammoth‘s sound hints toward a more metallic background than just pure Sabbath worship, and “Rise” brings that forward even as it pushes into slow-wah psychedelics, letting “Blade Runner” mirror “The Sun” in its sludgy push before closer “Walk Towards What Blinds You (Blood Bong)” introduces some backing vocals that fit surprisingly well even they kind of feel like a goof on the part of the band. Amammoth, as a word, would seem to be something not-mammoth. In sound, Amammoth are the opposite.

Amammoth on Facebook

Electric Valley Records website

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Nineteen Thirteen, MCMXIII

With emotional stakes sufficiently high throughout, MCMXIII is urgent enough to be post-hardcore, but there’s an underpinning of progressive heavy rock even in the mellower stretch of the eight-minute “Dogfight” that complements the noisier and more angular aspects on display elsewhere. Opener “Post Blue Collar Blues” sets the plotline for the newcomer Dayton, Ohio, four-piece, with thoughtful lyrics and a cerebral-but-not-dead-of-spirit instrumental style made full and spacious through the production. Melodies flesh out in “Cripple John” and “Old Face on the Wall,” brooding and surging in children-of-the-’90s fashion, but I hear a bit of Wovenhand in that finale as well — though maybe the one doesn’t exclude the other — so clearly Nineteen Thirteen are just beginning this obviously-passion-fueled exploration of sound aesthetic with these songs, but the debut EP they comprise cuts a wide swath with marked confidence and deceptive memorability. A new turn on Rust Belt heavy.

Nineteen Thirteen on Facebook

Nineteen Thirteen on Bandcamp

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Ikitan, Twenty-Twenty

Hey, you process trauma from living through the last year your way and Genova, Italy’s Ikitan will process it theirs. In their case, that means the writing, recording and self-release of their 20-minute single-song EP, Twenty-Twenty, a sprawling work of instrumentalist heavy post-rock rife with spacious, airy lead guitar and a solid rhythmic foundation. Movements occur in waves and layers, but there is a definite thread being woven throughout the outing from one part to the next, held together alternately by the bass or drums or even guitar, though it’s the latter that seems to be leading those changes as well. The shifts are fluid in any case, and Ikitan grow Twenty-Twenty‘s lone, titular piece to a satisfyingly heft as they move through, harnessing atmosphere as well as weight even before they lower volume for stretches in the second half. There’s a quick surge at the end, but “Twenty-Twenty” is more about journey than destination, and Ikitan make the voyage enticing.

Ikitan on Facebook

Ikitan on Bandcamp

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Smote, Bodkin

Loops, far-out spaces and a generally experimentalist feel ooze outward like Icelandic lava from Bodkin, the five-song debut LP from UK-based solo-outfit Smote. The gentleman behind the flow is Newcastle upon Tyne’s Daniel Foggin, and this is one of three releases he has out so far in 2021, along with a prior drone collaboration tape with Forest Mourning and a subsequent EP made of two tracks at around 15 minutes each. Clearly a project that can be done indoors during pandemic lockdown, Smote‘s material is wide-ranging just the same, bringing Eastern multi-instrumentalism and traditionalist UK psych together on “Fohrt” and “Moninna,” which would border on folk but for all that buzz in the background. The 11-minute “Motte” is a highlight of acid ritualizing, but the droning title-track that rounds out makes each crash count all the more for the spaces that separate them. I dig this a lot, between you and me. I get vibes like Lamp of the Universe here in terms of sonic ambition and resultant presence. That’s not a comparison I make lightly, and this is a project I will be following.

Smote on Bandcamp

Weird Beard Records store

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Nothing matters out here in the abyss.

“They” say no one can hear you scream in space, but “they” say all kinds of stupid shit to sell movie tickets. Tell it to the sax. Or tell it to the saz.

It’s Karl D’Silva on the former, Mike Vest (Bong, et al) on the latter as well as bass and guitar, and Graham Thompson doing the yeoman’s work on drums for this second transmission from the outer outer far out outer. Pluto, that woeful, coulda-been-somebody planetesimal, tracks in terms of distance with where OZO are coming from in the Drone Rock Records LP follow-up to Feb. 2020’s Saturn.

Five slabs to stretch out upon, a vaguely digestible 40-ish minutes in total, but what a 40 minutes. Freakery abounds as sax and the Turkish saz combine and the guitar issues effects waves like dictatorial proclamations, the drums doing duly whacked jazz snare insistence as if the point might be driven directly into the listener’s skull — and, rest assured, there are moments on Pluto where that feels like exactly what is happening. Looking at you, “Fine Tune Abuser.”

That particular 15-minute assault from the eighth dimension is placed second-to-last ahead of the finale in “Kerberos,” but by then the UK trio have already turned your brain into so much blood sausage that all that’s really left to do is wrap it in some intestine and take it to market.

Doom jazz. Space jazz. Cosmic battery of cymbals crashing. It’s somehow-improvised madness, the kind of claustrophobia one might feel in a vacuum, operating in a bound-to-be-misunderstood-or-worse-overlooked quadrant of the galaxy that the likes of Blind Idiot God have been known to inhabit while unquestionably finding its own way to oblivion. It careens there, and it courses and it runs and it dies and it lives and it kills and it saves along the way — up, down, in, out, wailing and woodchipping whatever it finds.

The human psyche wasn’t built for this, but let’s take Pluto‘s howls and shoot them out beyond the Kuiper Belt and see if the aliens get back and are like, “Wow you guys are really weird.” You know, really sass the neighbors, fireworks and all that. Elon Musk wishes this was what his brain was like: an on-its-own-wavelength shimmer of untamed will, not just refusing to bend, but refusing to be unbent.

There is nothing arcane about it. “Ninety Nine Years” ain’t cult rock, and nobody here is trying to convince you they’re Dracula or some shit. This is real-deal, spit-in-the-face-of-expectation creativity, and if that isn’t horror enough, they’ll turn structure on its head 50 times as they churn through the suitably vast reaches of “Pluto” and the somehow-motorik centerpiece “Hydra,” which might be classy if you consider showing up to the party dripping wet in a car made from a giant whelk shell class.

It’s hard to know at any moment what’s coming next since inevitably that’s more of the same which is wild and intangible. You spend your time trying to get a handle on it and maybe that’s missing the point. OZO aren’t the frog to be dissected, or the Grey laying across the metal table. They’re the band. Tip the band. Tip, tip, tip the band.

Or whatever it is you kids do these days. You kids with your far-out, all-the-way-gone hyper-lysergics. You kids out there getting laid on the holodeck. You kids throwing rocks at your elders with your telekinetic powers. That’s not even fair. Come on now.

Melt and wash away, maybe. Maybe tell the constable it’s time to get fucked twice and bear out the scorch. Maybe. How many channels. You’ll need all of them. Pluto. From the bark, you dummies.

We live in a galaxy of ass. Who among you? I ask. Who among you?

OZO, “Hydra” official video

OZO, Pluto (2020)

OZO on Thee Facebooks

OZO on Bandcamp

OZO preorder at Drone Rock Records

Drone Rock Records on Thee Facebooks

Drone Rock Records website

Well, I’m starting an hour later than I did yesterday, so that’s maybe not the most encouraging beginning I could think of, but screw it, I’m here, got music on, got fingers on keys, so I guess we’re underway. Yesterday was remarkably easy, even by Quarterly Review standards. I’ve been doing this long enough at this point — five-plus years — that I approach it with a reasonable amount of confidence it’ll get done barring some unforeseen disaster.

But yesterday was a breeze. What does today hold? In the words of Mrs. Wagner from fourth grade homeroom, “see me after.”

Ready, set, go.

Quarterly Review #11-20:

Horisont, Sudden Death

With a hefty dose of piano up front and keys throughout, Gothenburg traditionalist heavy rockers Horisont push retro-ism into full-on arena status. Moving past some of the sci-fi aspects of 2017’s About Time, Sudden Death comprises 13 tracks and an hour’s runtime, so rest assured, there’s room for everything, including the sax on “Into the Night,” the circa-’77 rock drama in the midsection of the eight-minute “Archeopteryx in Flight,” and the comparatively straightforward seeming bounce of “Sail On.” With cocaine-era production style, Sudden Death is beyond the earlier-’70s vintage mindset of the band’s earliest work, and songs like “Standing Here” and the penultimate proto-metaller “Reign of Madness” stake a claim on the later era, but the post-Queen melody of “Revolution” at the outset and the acoustic swing in “Free Riding” that follows set a lighthearted tone, and as always seems to be the case with Horisont, there’s nothing that comes across as more important than the songwriting.

Horisont on Thee Facebooks

Century Media website

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Ahab, Live Prey

Scourge of the seven seas that German nautically-themed funeral doomers Ahab are, Live Prey is their first live album and it finds them some five years removed from their last studio LP, The Boats of the Glen Carrig (review here). For a band who in the past has worked at a steady three-year pace, maybe it was time for something, anything to make its way to public ears. Fair enough, and in five tracks and 63 minutes, Live Prey spans all the way back to 2006’s Call of the Wretched Sea with “Ahab’s Oath” and presents all but two of that debut’s songs, beginning with the trilogy “Below the Sun,” “The Pacific” and “Old Thunder” and switching the order of “Ahab’s Oath” and “The Hunt” from how they originally appeared on the first record to end with the foreboding sounds of waves rolling accompanied by minimal keyboards. It’s massively heavy, of course — so was Call of the Wretched Sea — and whatever their reason for not including any other album’s material, at least they’ve included anything.

Ahab on Thee Facebooks

Napalm Records website

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Rrrags, High Protein

Let’s assume the title High Protein might refer to the fact that Dutch/Belgian power trio Rrrags have ‘trimmed the fat’ from the eight songs that comprise their 33-minute sophomore LP. It’s easy enough to believe listening to a cut like “Messin'” or the subsequent “Sad Sanity,” which between the two of them are about as long as the 5:14 opener “The Fridge” just before. But while High Protein has movers and groovers galore in those tracks and the fuzzier “Sugarcube” — the tone of which might remind that guitarist Ron Van Herpen is in Astrosoniq — the stomping “Demons Dancing” and the strutter “Hellfire,” there’s live-Deep–Purple-style breadth on the eight-minute “Dark is the Day” and closer “Window” bookends “The Fridge” in length while mellowing out and giving drummer/vocalist Rob Martin a rest (he’s earned it by then) while bassist Rob Zim and Van Herpen carry the finale. If thinking of it as a sleeper hit helps you get on board, so be it, but Rrrags‘ second album is of unmitigated class and straight-up killer performance. It is not one to be overlooked.

Rrrags on Thee Facebooks

Lay Bare Recordings website

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Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Viscerals

There’s stoner roll and doomed crash in “New Body,” drone-laced spoken-word experimentalism in “Blood and Butter,” and post-punk angular whathaveyou as “Halloween Bolson” plays out its nine-minute stretch, but Viscerals — the third or fourth Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs album, depending on what you count — seems to be at its most satisfying in blowout freak-psych moments like opener “Reducer” and “Rubbernecker,” which follows, while the kinda-metal of “World Crust”‘s central riff stumbles willfully and teases coming apart before circling back, and “Crazy in Blood” and closer “Hell’s Teeth” are more straight-up heavy rock. It’s a fairly wide arc the UK outfit spread from one end of the record to the other — and they’re brash enough to pull it off, to be sure — but with the hype machine so fervently behind them, I have a hard time knowing whether I’m actually just left flat by the record itself or all the hyperbole-set-on-fire that’s surrounded the band for the last couple years. Viscerals gets to the heart of the matter, sure enough, but then what?

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs on Thee Facebooks

Rocket Recordings on Bandcamp

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Earthbong, Bong Rites

Kiel, Germany’s Earthbong answer the stoner-sludge extremity of their 2018 debut, One Earth One Bong (review here), with, well, more stoner-sludge extremity. What, you thought they’d go prog? Forget it. You get three songs. Opener “Goddamn High” and “Weedcult Today” top 15 minutes each, and closer “Monk’s Blood” hits half an hour. Do the quick math yourself on that and you’ll understand just how much Earthbong have been looking forward to bashing you over the head with riffs. “Weedcult Today” is more agonizingly slow than “Goddamn High,” at least at the beginning, but it builds up and rolls into a pace that, come to think of it, is still probably slower than most, and of course “Monk’s Blood” is an epic undertaking right up to its last five minutes of noise. It could’ve been an album on its own. But seriously, if you think Earthbong give a shit, you’re way off base. This is tone, riff and weed worship and everything else is at best a secondary concern. Spend an hour at mass and see if you don’t come out converted.

Earthbong on Thee Facebooks

Earthbong on Bandcamp

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Rito Verdugo, Post-Primatus

No doubt that at some future time shortly after the entire world has moved on from the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be a glut of releases comprised of material written during the lockdown. Peruvian four-piece Rito Verdugo are ahead of the game, then, with their Post-Primatus four-song EP. Issued digitally as the name-your-price follow-up to their also-name-your-price 2018 debut, Cosmos, it sets a 14-minute run from its shortest cut to its longest, shifting from the trippy “Misterio” into fuzz rockers “Monte Gorila” (which distills Earthless vibes to just over three minutes) and “Lo Subnormal” en route to the rawer garage psychedelia of “Inhumación,” which replaces its vocals with stretches of lead guitar that do more than just fill the spaces verses might otherwise be and instead add to the breadth of the release as a whole. Safe to assume Rito Verdugo didn’t plan on spending any amount of time this year staying home to avoid getting a plague, but at least they were able to use the time productively to give listeners a quick sample of where they’re at sound-wise coming off the first album. Whenever and however it shows up, I’ll look forward to what they do next.

Rito Verdugo on Thee Facebooks

Rito Verdugo on Bandcamp

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Death the Leveller, II

Signed to Cruz Del Sur Music as part of that label’s expanding foray into traditionalist doom (see also: Pale Divine, The Wizar’d, Apostle of Solitude, etc.), Dublin’s Death the Leveller present an emotionally driven four tracks on their 38-minute label debut, the counterintuitively titled II. Listed as their first full-length, it’s about the same length as their debut “EP,” 2017’s I, but more important is the comfort and patience the band shows with working in longer-form material, opener “The Hunt Eternal,” “The Golden Bough” and closer “The Crossing” making an impression at over nine minutes apiece — “The Golden Bough” tops 12 — while “So They May Face the Sun” runs a mere 7:37 and is perhaps the most unhurried of the bunch, playing out with a cinematic sweep of guitar melody and another showcase for the significant presence of frontman Denis Dowling, who’s high in the mix at times but earns that forward position with a suitably standout performance across the record’s span.

Death the Leveller on Thee Facebooks

Cruz Del Sur Music website

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Marrowfields, Metamorphoses

It isn’t surprising to learn that the members of Fall River, Massachusetts, five-piece Marrowfields come from something of an array of underground styles, some of them pushing into more extreme terrain, because the five songs of their debut full-length, Metamorphoses, do likewise. With founding guitarist/main-songwriter Brandon Green at the helm as producer as well, there’s a suitably inward-looking feel to the material, but coinciding with its rich atmospheres are flashes of blastbeats, death metal chug, double-kick and backing growls behind the cleaner melodic vocals that keep Marrowfields distinct from entirely traditionalist doom. It is a niche into which they fit well on this first long-player, and across the five songs/52 minutes of Metamorphoses, they indeed shapeshift between genre elements in order to best serve the purposes of the material, calling to mind Argus in the progressive early stretch of centerpiece “Birth of the Liberator” while tapping Paradise Lost chug and ambience before the blasts kick in on closer “Dragged to the World Below.” Will be interesting to see which way their — or Green‘s, as it were — focus ultimately lies, but there isn’t one aesthetic nuance misused here.

Marrowfields on Thee Facebooks

Black Lion Records on Bandcamp

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Dätcha Mandala, Hara

Dätcha Mandala present a strong opening salvo of rockers on Hara, their second album for MRS Red Sound, before turning over to all-out tambourine-and-harp blues on “Missing Blues.” From there, they could go basically anywhere they want, and they do, leading with piano on “Morning Song,” doing wrist-cramp-chug-into-disco-hop in “Sick Machine” and meeting hand-percussion with space rocking vibes on “Moha.” They’ve already come a long way from the somewhat misleading ’70s heavy of opener “Stick it Out,” “Mother God” and “Who You Are,” but the sonic turns that continue with the harder-edged “Eht Bup,” the ’70s balladry of “Tit’s,” an unabashed bit o’ twang on “On the Road” and full-on fuzz into a noise freakout on closer “Pavot.” Just what the hell is going on with Hara? Anything Dätcha Mandala so desire, it would seem. They have the energy to back it up, but if you see them labeled as any one microgenre or another, keep in mind that inevitably that’s only part of the story and the whole thing is much weirder than they might be letting on. No complaints with that.

Dätcha Mandala on Thee Facebooks

MRS Red Sound

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Numidia, Numidia

If you’ve got voices in your band that can harmonize like guitarists James Draper, Shane Linfoot and Mike Zoias, I’m not entirely sure what would lead you to start your debut record with a four-minute instrumental, but one way or another, Sydney, Australia’s Numidia — completed by bassist/keyboardist Alex Raffaelli and drummer Nathan McMahon — find worthy manners in which to spend their time. Their first collection takes an exploratory approach to progressive heavy rock, seeming to feel its way through components strung together effectively while staying centered around the guitars. Yes, three of them. Psychedelia plays a strong role in later pieces “Red Hymn” and the folky “Te Waka,” but if the eponymous “Numidia” is a mission statement on the part of the five-piece, it’s one cast in a prog mentality pushed forward with poise to suit. Side A capper “A Million Martyrs” would seem to draw the different sides together, but it’s no minor task for it to do so, and there’s little sign in these songs that Numidia won’t grow more expansive as time goes on.

Numidia on Thee Facebooks

Nasoni Records website

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[Click play above to stream Saturn by OZO in its entirely. Release is Feb. 7 on Riot Season Records. Preorders here.]

It seems fitting that OZO should make their debut roughly concurrent to scientists unveiling the highest resolution to-date images of the surface of the sun. The Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, three-piece are ostensibly led by guitarist/bassist Mike Vest, known for his drone plunge in BONG and the spacey reach of Blown Out, among a slew of others. Joining Vest for the five-track debut album, Saturn (on Riot Season Records), are Ballpeen‘s Graham Thompson on drums/mixing/mastering, and alto saxophonist Karl D’Silva (a bandmate of Vest‘s in Drunk in Hell), and together, the trio burn through improvisational pieces of varied tenure but largely united purpose, as though someone flipped a switch and said, “okay, go,” and off they went. Entirely instrumental, the record wails through most of its 38-minute run, Thompson‘s drums not so much holding progressions to the ground as propelling them up from the surface into the airless ether, as heard on the shorter “Side Way,” just three-plus minutes, but a jazzy vibe that urges listeners to pick their favorite Coltrane for a comparison (Alice!) and roll with the heady, dug-in spirit. They are gone and gone and gone.

Would be almost unfair to call it self-indulgent, since that’s the idea. The exploratory go-ness of these pieces, especially as a first offering of any sort from OZO, are a clarion to free-fusion tweakers and anyone anywhere slightly out of phase with their surroundings, the just-don’t-fit feel comes through resonant through “Lifeship” at the outset and again in the resilient echoes and avant drum expressions of closer “Centuries.” Of course, an obvious focal point for the LP are its two broadest jams, “Saturn” (12:47) and “Nuclear Fuel” (11:06), which together comprise the majority of Saturn‘s runtime. While “Lifeship” and “Slide Way” burn out cosmic and “Centuries” harnesses an emergent wash of noise alongside its noteworthy rhythmic freakery, it is the drift and shove of “Saturn” and the encompassing howl of “Nuclear Fuel” that ultimately define the album, appearing in succession as they do after “Lifeship” as though OZO were aware of the challenge being issued to their audience — a sort of dare-you-to-keep-up mentality that seems as much a repellent for squares as a clarion to the lysergic converted. Come get down, come get obliterated. Fair.

The nature of extreme music is to seek not just a specialized listenership, but a that-much-deeper connection therewith on account of the rareness of the bond. One suspects that with OZO, those who can match wits with the band’s interstellar scorch will line up to do so again and again, which is fortunate since there’s already a second record in the works, titled Pluto. Walking through Saturn‘s fire unscathed is no easy feat, of course, but in addition to Vest loyalists, the jazzy appeal of these tracks should open as many minds to what OZO are doing as it might close. One way or the other, they’re doing it, and the resultant response feels like a secondary consideration at best.

That is, none of this material comes across as having been written with an audience in mind. I don’t say that as a dig against it, since I don’t think that’s what OZO wanted to do in the first place, and they stay true to their mission throughout. It just means they’re working on a different level and toward different ends. To go further, none of this material comes across as having been “written” at all. More like it was found, or perhaps pieced together out of elements floating in the air around the room where the instruments were set up. The inherent value of Saturn comes in capturing an expressive moment, the urgency of what’s being done and the traditionalism of free jazz as a forward-reaching reaction against form.

Vest, D’Silva and Thompson sound like people who find the conventional boring. Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t, but it’s the portrait they paint in the burning oranges and reds and yellows of Saturn, a sense of heat duly depicted on the album’s cover. However off-the-cuff it may be — I don’t know if it’s entirely improvised or if there were overdubs after the fact or what — the feeling of spontaneity in that moment is what’s most being sought, and it’s what’s most prevalent throughout the five pieces that comprise the album. The songs leave no room for compromise. The commitment to outward-directed freakery is unflinching, and for many if not most who take them on, OZO will simply prove too much. Like a machine burning overload. That, too, is a purposeful intent on the part of the band. They’re willful in abandoning normality for the swirling chaos that consumes “Nuclear Fuel” in its later reaches, and the dream-sequence distortion of “Centuries” that wraps up is high order psychedelic noir that is just as likely to melt minds as expand them.

Dangerous? To a point, maybe. I don’t know if OZO are ever at risk of really falling apart here, and if they did, it would be easy enough for it to become all part of the non-plan, but as they move through the liquefied abrasion of “Lifeship” into the title-track, the feeling of something unhinged and vital is palpable. Credit for that should and must go to Thompson, who instead of trying to harness some cohesion and structure from out of all this churning brew becomes part of the freakery, no less exploratory than D’Silva‘s channel-spanning horn echoes or Vest‘s effects-laced guitar. As noted, OZO are already working on their next full-length, which one can only imagine will continue their through-the-temple-into-the-brain plunge, and however the two works may ultimately relate, their debut burns with an intensity worthy of standing alone as it inherently does in sound and style. Saturn presents a vision of psychedelic and space rocking extremity rarely honed to such a degree, and its vibrancy borders on blinding, which is all the better for OZO to catch you off-guard with their next hairpin turn. Hu-mans beware.

OZO on Thee Facebooks

OZO on Bandcamp

Riot Season Records on Thee Facebooks

Riot Season Records on Bandcamp

Riot Season Records website

I guess I missed it when UK spacepunks Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs became a big deal after 2018’s King of Cowards, but hey, that’s cool. Good for them. I don’t think there are many who’d tell you they didn’t earn it, or at least not for reasons beyond their own bitterness. That’s part of the thing though.

Their new album, Viscerals, is due in April with vinyl through Rocket Recordings. They’ll be at SXSW before that, also making a stop at Brooklyn’s famed Saint Vitus Bar before that, as one will. Neat. Go get ’em, dudes.

Art and info from the trusty PR wire:

PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM VISCERALS

True to form, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have left the wiser of us aware that they are no band to be messed with. In the seven years since this band’s inception, the powerful primal charge at their heart has been amplified far beyond the realms of their original imagination. What’s more, no one has been more taken aback by this transformation than the band itself.

This culminated recently at a sold-out show at London’s renowned former fleapit Scala. “That was the first gig where we were properly smacked with a feeling that something had shifted,” reflects vocalist Matt Baty. “Something big and bold and positive. I felt quite overwhelmed with emotion at one point during that show. I’m not sure anyone paid to see me cry onstage, but I was close.”

This upward trajectory has done nothing to make the Newcastle-based quintet complacent, however, as they’ve used the cumulative force behind them as fuel for their most ambitious and hard-hitting record yet.

Viscerals, their third proper release, is an enormous leap forward in confidence, adventure, and sheer intensity even from their 2018 breakthrough King Of Cowards. Incisive in its riff-driven attack, infectiously catchy in its songcraft, and more intrepid than ever in its experimental approach, Viscerals is the sound of a leaner, more vicious Pigsx7, and one with their controls set way beyond the pulverizing one-riff workouts of their early days.

Watch the video for the fearsome opener “Reducer,” which has a battle cry of “Ego kills everything” that brings a philosophical bent to its Sabbathian abjection, here.

“This is the first taste of our new album Viscerals,” the band says. “It’s called ‘Reducer’ and it has a very strong flavor. It’s one of the songs that came together quickest during the writing process. It’s immediate and unruly and has that cathartic edge we seek out from the music we make together. It’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun to play live. Let’s rock.”

Elsewhere “Rubbernecker” may be the most melodious ditty this band has yet attempted, redolent of the debauched swagger of Jane’s Addiction.

Meanwhile, the sinister sound-collage of “Blood And Butter” delves into jarring abstraction anew, “New Body” countenances a bracing Melvins-and-Sonic-Youth demolition derby, and, perhaps most memorably of all, the perverse banger “Crazy In Blood” marries MBV-ish guitar curlicues in its verses to a raise-your-fists chorus worthy of Twisted Sister or Turbonegro.

Yet Pigsx7 have effortlessly broadened their horizons and dealt with all these new avenues without sacrificing one iota of their trademark eccentricity and the personality of this band has never been stronger.

“We’re a peculiar bunch of people — a precarious balance of passion, intensity and the absurd,” notes Baty. Indeed, locked into a tight deadline in the studio, the band were forced to rally forces and to throw everything they had into it, and created as concise and powerful a statement as could be summoned forth. “We booked dates in Sam’s studio before we’d written 80% of the album,” reveals guitarist Adam Ian Sykes. “We definitely thrive under pressure. It’s stressful but that stress seems to manifest itself in a positive way.”

Yet, for all that, this record is the most far-reaching yet and its ability to get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition is implicit from its title outwards. “Viscerals is reflection of many things I guess,” says guitarist Sam Grant, whose Blank Studios was the venue in question for the band, the rogues’ gallery of which is completed by bassist John-Michael Hedley and drummer Christopher Morley. “It’s the internal; it’s our health and physicality; it’s bodily and unseen; it’s essence that forgoes intellect; and it’s not a real word.”

“At times it feels like we’re on a playground roundabout and there’s a fanatical group of people pushing it to turn faster,” reckons Baty. “Then when it’s at peak speed, they all jump on too and for just a few minutes, we all feel liberated, together.”

Such is the relentless momentum of this unique and ever-porcine outfit; hedonists of the grittiest and most life-affirming ride in the land, and still the hungriest animals at the rock trough.

VISCERALS TRACK LISTING:
“Reducer”
“Rubbernecker”
“New Body”
“Blood And Butter”
“World Crust”
“Crazy In Blood”
“Halloween Bolson”
“Hell’s Teeth”

PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS TOUR DATES:
3/13 — St. Vitus — Brooklyn, NY
3/15 — Moroccan Lounge — Los Angeles, CA
3/16-3/20 — SXSW — Austin, TX

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are:
Matt Baty (Vocals)
Sam Grant (Guitar)
Adam Ian Sykes (Guitar)
Christopher Morley (Drums)
John-Michael Hedley (Bass)

https://www.facebook.com/PigsPigsPigsPigsPigsPigsPigs/
https://www.instagram.com/Pigsx7/
https://www.pigsx7.com/
https://rocketrecordings.bandcamp.com/
http://rocketrecordings.blogspot.co.uk/

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, “Reducer” official video