Posted in Whathaveyou on October 18th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Colorado four-piece Night Fishing debuted earlier this year with an EP called Live Bait (review here) that on Dec. 1 they’ll follow with two more cuts being delivered as a second EP, Yuppie Cortado. The 10-minute title-track of the new offering is streaming now, and it reinforces the feeling I had coming off Live Bait, which is that the band are onto something. There aren’t a lot of American acts who willfully take on a European-style heavy psychedelia, but Night Fishing — in addition to their sportsmanly thematic — do have that going on, and though they’re drawling and mostly spoken, there are vocals on “Yuppie Cortado,” which if I’m not mistaken is a first for the band.
That’s especially noteworthy to me because of the involvement in Night Fishing of Zach Amster, also of Small Stone heavy rockers Abrams. Dude can sing, and that band’s penchant for structure and traditional songwriting isn’t to be understated. If some of those impulses toward craft are bleeding into Night Fishing, then the Monster Magnet-style space heavy of “Yuppie Cortado” might be just the beginning of what they’ll unfurl going forward. Regardless, you should check out the song and maybe preorder a tape. Yeah that’s right, tape preorders. The future is also the past. You get used to it.
From the PR wire:
Instrumental Psych Rockers NIGHT FISHING to Share New EP ‘Yuppie Cortado’
Denver’s newest lords of lysergic, instrumental wizardry, NIGHT FISHING, have released their second EP, ‘Yuppie Cortado’. Guaranteed to bring Ego Death to All (even Yuppie Scum), the EP contains two, new, third eye opening jamz of Rocky Mountain psych rock bliss.
Listen to ‘Yuppie Cortado’ on all streaming services HERE & watch the “Yuppie Cortado” fish enhanced visualizer video HERE. Video edited by Frank Huang (YOB, Full of Hell, END).
‘Yuppie Cortado’ was recorded live by Chris McNaughton at Rocky Mountain Recorders, mixing and mastering also by Chris McNaughton and logo by Roy Jones.
NIGHT FISHING Live: Oct 21 – Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive w/ Acid Mothers Temple
About NIGHT FISHING:
Comprised of four seasoned Rocky Mountain Road Dogs (members of Call of the Void, Green Druid, Abrams, Muscle Beach), NIGHT FISHING exist to explore the boundaries of improvisation, mood and structure within the realms of heavy, instrumental sound. They released their debut EP ‘Live Bait’ in Spring 2023 and have been wowing audiences with their trip-inducing psychedelic live shows around the West since forming.
NIGHT FISHING are: Gordon Koch – Drums Graham Zander – Guitar Zach Amster – Guitar Justin Sanderson – Bass
Didn’t we just do this? Yeah, kind of. It’s been a weird season, but I knew last month when I launched the Spring 2023 Quarterly Review that it needed to be more than two full weeks and given the timing of everything else slated around then and now, this is what worked to make it happen. For what it’s worth, I have QRs scheduled for July and early October, subject to change, of course.
The bottom line either way is it’s another batch of 50 reviews this week and then that’s a wrap for Spring. It’s a constant barrage of music these days anyhow, and I’m forever behind on everything, but I hope at least you can find something here you dig, whether previously familiar or not. We go.
Quarterly Review #1-10:
HIGH LEAF, Vision Quest
An awaited debut from this Philadelphia heavy rock scene outfit, HIGH LEAF‘s Vision Quest makes its home among heavy tropes (also some minute cultural appropriation in the title) with unabashed glee and deceptively sharp songwriting. Certainly opener “Green Rider” is perfectly willing to beat you over the head with its chorus — and rightly so, you have it coming — but the spacious title-track that follows stretches over eight minutes and seamlessly works through drift and heavy psych impulses to get to the post-grunge roll that makes its increasingly aggro presence known past six minutes in, and that’s by no means the final bit of sludge to be had as the later “Hard to Find” leans toward nastiness only to be offset by the funky outset of “Painted Desert,” having pushed deeper from the Kyussery of “Dead Eye” and a swagger in “Subversive” worthy of comparison to Earthride. This lineup of the band has already split (there’s a new one, no worries), and how that reboot will affect HIGH LEAF going forward obviously remains to be seen, but this is a ‘serving notice’-type debut, doubling down on that in closing duo “March to the Grave” and “The Rot,” and the eight songs and 38 minutes commune with groove and riffs like they’ve been speaking the language the whole time. There’s definitely a vision at work. Let’s see where the quest takes them.
Fucking hell I wish this was what the future sounded like. It rocks. It’s interesting. It’s driven to be its own thing despite traceable roots. It’s got edge but it’s not hackneyed. It’s the tomorrow we were promised when industrial rock and metal became a thing in the 1990s and that corporate alt-everything and pop-punk usurped. I knew I wanted to write about it now, because it’s coming out now, but I’ll tell you honestly, I’ve barely scratched the surface of JAAW‘s Svart-issued debut, Supercluster — recorded at Bear Bites Horse in London by Wayne Adams, who’s also in the band alongside Andy Cairns of Therapy?, Mugstar‘s Jason Stoll and Adam Betts (of Squarepusher and others) — and this is the kind of album that’s going to be years in revealing itself. How about this? Sometime in 2028, if this site is still here, I’ll follow-up and let you know what I’ve found digging into the sinister groove of “Rot” or the shout-kraut rumble and noise of “Bring Home the Motherlode, Barry,” “The Dead Drop” going from minimalism to full heavy New Wave wash in five minutes’ time, and so on, but for right now, let it serve as the cannonball to be lobbed at anyone who says there aren’t any acts out there doing new things or pushing different styles forward, because hell’s bells, that’s the only place this goes even as it also seems to go everywhere at the same time, unto closing out with a Björk cover “Army of Me” as imagined by Ministry doing ’90s drum ‘n’ bass. Some things are just bigger than the year of their release, and I look forward to living with this record.
The Bridesmaid, Come on People Now, Smile on Your Brother
From the opening drone-and-toy-chime-forward over industrial black metal of “Leytonstone: Eat Your Landlord” through the sample-fed machine sludge-turned-psych experimentalism that gives way to a shimmering haze of jazz metal in “Cleveland: And the Rain Came Down” and the can’t-fool-me-by-now acoustic strum at the start of “Summerland: A Long, Maintenance-Free Life” that runs a current of cello under its aural collage and low-end lumber early only to bask in news-and-drone departure with percussion later on the way to what post-hardcore could still someday be, the name of the EP is Come on People Now, Smile on Your Brother and The Bridesmaid deliver the proceedings in a manner more suited to Kurt Cobain‘s fuckall rasp of that line rather than the Youngbloods original. So it’s probably the latter. In any case, the UK solo-plus-friends outfit helmed and steered by JJ Saddington are an aural barrage, and while the temptation is to think of the three-song/21-minute offering as a blender on liquefy, the truth is the material is more thought out, more considerately mixed, and more engaging, than that kind of spastic randomness implies. If you can keep up with the changes, the adventure of listening is well worth the ankles sprained in its twists, but you should go into it knowing that the challenge is part of the appeal.
If the hard push and tonal burl of comparatively straight-ahead opener “The Last Witch” aren’t convincing, stick around through “Celestial Bird Spirit” and “Impermanence” on the rest of side A before you resolve one way or the other as regards Milana‘s debut album, Milvus. The Mallorca-based four-piece are for sure in conversation with fest-ready modern European heavy rock, and that’s the thread that weaves throughout the album, but in the 11-minute “Impermanance,” they build on the more temperate rollout of “Celestial Bird Spirit” and find an intriguing blend of atmosphere and dense fuzz, more moody than psychedelic, but smart to hold back its weightiest tonality for the rolling end. Appropriately enough, “Lucid Reality” brings them back to ground at the start of side B, but still has an atmospheric effect in its verse, with vocal layering over open-spaced guitar and an alt-rock pickup as they move toward the chorus, and Howling Wolf gives a class-conscious definition of the blues, in the long intro of “Gray City Lights,” setting a difficult standard for the rest of the song to match, but the organ helps. And all seems well and fine for “Whispering Wind” to wrap up mirroring the rocker “The Last Witch” at the start until the song breaks, the harmony starts, and then the growls and massive fuzz start in the last minute and it turns out they were metal all along. Go figure. There’s growing to do, but there’s more happening on Milvus than one listen will tell you, and that in itself is a good sign.
Swedish upstart four-piece New Mexican Doom Cult offer a distinctly Monolordian weep of lead guitar on “Seven Spirits,” but even that is filtered through the band’s own take, and that’s true of their first full-length, Necropolis more generally, as the Gävle outfit now comprised of guitarist/vocalist/principal songwriter Nils Ahnland, guitarist Johan Klyven Kvastegård, bassist Emil Alstermark and drummer Jonathan Ekvall present seven songs and 48 minutes of dug-in rockers, distortion keyed to its fuzziest degree as Ahnland hints vocally on “Underground” toward a root in darker and more metallic fare ahead of the chugging build that rounds out the eight-minute centerpiece title-track and the make-doom-swing ethic being followed in closer “Worship the Sun.” “Vortex” is a highlight for the melody as much as the double-dose of nodfuzz guitar work, and opener “Architect” sets an atmospheric course but assures that the sense of movement is never really gone, something that’s a benefit even to the righteous Sabbath blowout verse in the penultimate “Archangel.” Much of what they’re doing will be familiar to experienced heads, but not unwelcome for that.
Capable double-guitar heavy rock pervades the 43-minute Gentle Beast by the Swiss five-piece of the same name. Mixed by Jeff Henson of Duel and issued through Sixteentimes Music, the eight-song run is defined by knowing itself as stoner rock, and that remains true as “Super Sapiens” departs into its post-midsection jam, eventually returning to the chorus, which is almost unfortunately hooky. “Greedy Man” is almost purely Kyuss in its constructed pairing of protest and riff, but the “Caterpillar” shows a different side of the band’s character in its smooth volume shifts, winding leads and understated finish, leading into the sharper-edged outset of closer “Toxic Times.” In the forward thrust of “Joint Venture,” the opener “Asteroid Miner” with its gruff presentation, and the speedier swing of “Headcage” reinforcing the vocal reference to Samsara Blues Experiment in the leadoff, Gentle Beast tick all the boxes they need to tick for this debut long-player some four years after the band’s initial 7″ single, setting up multiple avenues of possible and hopeful progression while proving dexterous songwriters in the now. Won’t change your life, but isn’t trying to convince you it will, either.
Denver four-piece Bloodsports — also stylized all-lowercase: bloodsports — give a heavygaze impression with “Sky Mall” at the launch of their self-titled debut EP that the subsequent “Crimp” gleefully pulls the rug right from under with a solo section like All Them Witches grew up listening to The Cure after its Weezery verse, and the proceedings only gets grungier from there with the low-key Nirvana brooding of “Sustain” (also issued in 2022 as a standalone single) and its larger-scale, scorch-topped distorted finish and the shaker-inclusive indie ritual that is “Carnival” until it explodes into a blowout ending like the release of tension everyone always wanted but never actually got from Violent Femmes. Some noisy skronk guitar finishes over the hungover fuzz, which is emblematic of the way the entire release — only 11 minutes long, mind you — derives its character from the negative space, from its smaller moments of nuance, as well as from its fuller-sounding stretches. They’re young and they sound it, but there’s a sonic ideal being chased through the material and Bloodsports may yet carve their aural persona from that chase. As it is, the emotive aspects on display in “Sustain” and the volatility shown in the roll of “Sky Mall” make in plain that this project has places it wants to go and areas to explore, and one hopes Bloodsports continue to bring their ideas together with such fluidity.
Recorded seemingly almost entirely live on audio and video, vibrancy would seem to be the underpinning that draws Night Fishing‘s Live Bait together, if fishing isn’t. The Denver four-piece are a relatively new formation, with guitarists Graham Zander (also Green Druid) and Zach Amster (Abrams), bassist Justin Sanderson (Muscle Beach) and drummer Gordon Koch (Call of the Void) all coming together from their sundry other projects to explore a space between the kosmiche, heavy rock and semi-improv jamming. The turns and fills and crashes that round out the second of three cuts, “No Services,” for example, feel off-the-cuff, but throughout most of “Alone With My Thoughts” and at least in the initial Slift-like shuffle at the start of “Slapback Twister,” there’s a plan at work. At 25 minutes, they’re only about a song shy of making Live Bait a full-length — though another track might mess up the shortest-to-longest and alphabetical ordering Live Bait has now, which are fun — but the instrumentalist exploration is suited to the nascent feel of the outfit, and while I don’t think Night Fishing is anybody’s only band here, if they can build on the sense of purpose they give to the jangly rhythm and airy solo of “Slapback Twister” and the right-on push of “Alone With My Thoughts,” they can make their records as long or as short as they want and they’re still bound to catch ears.
Following last year’s self-titled debut EP, Indianapolis solo-project Wizard Tattoo cuts itself open and bleeds DIY on the seven songs and 40 minutes of the self-recorded, self-released Fables of the Damned, beginning with distinct moments of departure in opener “Wizard Van” and “The Black Mountain Pass,” the latter of which returns to its gutted-out chorus with maestro Bram the Bard (who also did the cover) cutting through the tonescape of his own creation to underscore the structure at work. There are stories to be told in “The Vengeful Thulsa Dan” and the folkish “Any Which Way but Tuned,” which brings together acoustics and chanting like a gamer version of Wovenhand, deep-mixed tom thud peppered throughout while the chimes are more forward, while the seven-minute “The Ghost of Doctor Beast” picks up with the slowest and most doomed of the included rollouts, “God Damn This Wizard Tattoo” ups the tempo with a catchy chorus, a little bit of mania in the hi-hat under the guitar solo, and hints dropped in the bassline of the grunge aspects soon to be highlighted in instrumental closer “Abendrote.” The sense of character is bigger than the production, and that balance is something that will need to be ironed out over time, but the dug-in curio aspects of Fables of the Damned make it engaging, whatever it may or may not lead toward.
I’ll never claim to be anything more than a dilettante when it comes to noise rock, and I’ll tell you outright that Kansas City’s Nerver are new to me as of this Brothers in Christ split with Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile, but both acts are coming from a strong Midwestern tradition of post-industrial (talking economy not genre) disaffection and building on momentum from strong 2022 releases, those being Nerver‘s even-the-CD-sold-out (aha! but not from the label! got it!) sophomore full-length CASH and Chat Pile‘s much-lauded debut, God’s Country (review here), and the scream-topped bombast of the one and volatile emotive antipoetry of the other make fitting companions across the included four songs, as Nerver‘s “Kicks in the Sky” underscores its jabs with deep low rumble as a bed for the harshly delivered verse and “The Nerve” shoves itself faceward in faster and less angular fashion, consuming like Chicago post-metal but pissed off like Midwestern hardcore while Chat Pile build through “King” en route to the panicked slaughter of “Cut,” which is sure enough to trigger fight-or-flight in your brain before its sub-five-minute run is up. Neither arrives at this point without hype behind them, both would seem to have earned it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go put on that Nerver album and play a bit of catchup.
Posted in Whathaveyou on April 6th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
A fascinating turn here for Denver guitarist Zach Amster, whose other outfit Abrams recently announced a tour for May in the company of BleakHeart (dates here), and joins members of Green Druid, Muscle Beach and Call of the Void in the new instrumentalist four-piece Night Fishing. One doesn’t even have to get through the nine-minute entirety of “Alone With My Thoughts” — which one surely is when fishing at night; I’d also like to mention that my phone corrected ‘thoughts’ to ‘thighs’ there, which would be a winner as regards typos — to get the sense of shift that Night Fishing‘s impending Brutal Panda-delivered three-songer, Live Bait (getting the theme?), is playing toward. There’s some of Slift‘s Euro-style space boogie in there, along with a touch of psychedelic atmosphere, but a solid rhythm lies beneath the sprawl of its exploration, and you would definitely still call it rock rather than a loose lysergic jam. There’s a plan at work.
That’s something Night Fishing shares with Abrams, but the absence of vocals is interesting. They could probably tour Europe on these songs for two months, hit festivals and whatnot, and never look back, and nor could they be faulted for doing exactly that if it came to it. Of course, I don’t know what they will or won’t — I haven’t even heard the other two tracks here yet, so any assessment of aesthetic is partial at best — but when I think about Abrams poppish aspects next to this, let alone the other members’ main projects, it feels like a change that’s worth noting and I look forward to where it might lead, even if that’s just a lot of riffs about fishing. Here for it, in the parlance of our times, or, more likely, a couple years ago. I’m always behind on that shit.
The PR wire has the AI art, release info and the song stream. Live Bait is out April 21. Enjoy:
Instrumental Psych Rockers NIGHT FISHING Share New Single, “Alone With My Thoughts”, + Video
New EP, ‘Live Bait’, Out April 21st via Brutal Panda Records
Brutal Panda Records will release ‘Live Bait’, the debut EP from Denver, CO’s NIGHT FISHING, on April 21st. Comprised of four seasoned Rocky Mountain Road Dogs (members of Call of the Void, Green Druid, Abrams, Muscle Beach), NIGHT FISHING exist to explore the boundaries of improvisation, mood and structure within the realms of heavy, instrumental sound. Today, they’re revealing the music video for “Alone With My Thoughts,” the record’s second single.
Across three tracks and 25+ minutes of fuzzed-out Heavy Psych, hypnotic Krautrock and free-form jazz, NIGHT FISHING seamlessly weave together a melting pot of brain-liquifying sonic euphoria. An experience that could only be formulated live in the studio and within the confines of the moment…NIGHT FISHING is for lovers and will take you where the vibe wants to go.
Drummer Gordon Koch, who also created the album’s trippy artwork via Artificial Intelligence, commented on how the project came together:
“NIGHT FISHING is a Heavy Psych/Krautrock improv concept I mulled over during the lockdown period of the initial COVID-19 outbreak. My longtime touring metal band (Call of the Void) had just broken up (December 2019) and my jazz connection had moved out of state so I had no musical prospects while I was held up in my apartment. I wanted to combine elements of improv jazz into a rock format using light song structure to allow for more natural flow of solos, giving each player room to breathe and express themselves. Once the city opened back up a little bit I hit the pavement looking for players. I found 3 friends from the Denver metal scene who were looking for something different and could handle the riffage!
“This EP was recorded live, as both an audio and visual experience, by Chris McNaughton at Rocky Mountain Recorders. We sat in the round with a full camera crew in the studio, led by Alex Pace, to capture the moment and energy, bouncing solos off each other all in one take. I feel like these first songs are a more “live” experience so I wanted the video crew there to allow everyone to join us. We were mostly familiar with all the hits but use a lot of eye contact and musical cues to move things along. This session was a BLAST to record, I think about 4 hours total in the room.”
He elaborated further on their second single “Alone With My Thoughts”, saying:
“This was our first song written as a group that took the NIGHT FISHING idea to fruition. Once we played it live in front of people we knew we had a great formula to expand on.”
‘Live Bait’ will see an April 21st release on tape, CD and digital formats.
A super limited deluxe, tackle box edition complete with a one-of-a-kind fishing certificate will also be available along with a gently used fishing vessel, limited to 1, for the TRUE DIE-HARDS ONLY!
NIGHT FISHING will be performing a record release show at The Crypt on April 28th in Denver, CO
‘Live Bait’ Track List: 1. Alone with My Thoughts 2. No Services 3. Slapback Twister
About NIGHT FISHING:
Four Denver road dogs (Call of the Void, Green Druid, Abrams, Muscle Beach) having a good time in the space of improvisation and slight structure. Heavy psych and Krautrock with jazz rules, a project meant to include both listeners and musicians.
We go where the vibe is pushing us. NIGHT FISHING is for lovers.
NIGHT FISHING are: Gordon Koch – Drums Graham Zander – Guitar Zach Amster – Guitar Justin Sanderson – Bass
