Drone soloist Mark Kitchens, who operates under the moniker of Slow Draw with the experimentalist project, is on cusp of an April 29 release for his new five-song LP, The People’s Department of Governmental Checks and Balances. From the tense dub of its opening chapter “A Misleading Sense of Direction,” which sets its low-key beat and weaving line of synthesizer drone as a backdrop for a sample from air traffic control that I’m pretty sure returns backward on closer “Trying to Land,” the 35-minute work sets itself forth as a kind of resonant, individualized psychedelia distinct from what Kitchens has done with Slow Draw up to this point, but very much born out of those root creative impulses.
Consider that most drone you hear is made by guitarists. Kitchens handles a range of instruments inSlow Draw, but is also the drummer in Stone Machine Electric, and so that organic and electric beatmaking would be a part of his approach makes sense, even as the 12-plus-minute “Paradise of Fools” seems to be so much about the SunnO)))-style tonal overwhelm of its guitar. And fair enough, but while Kitchens spends a decent amount of the total runtime in that space, it’s still only part of the overarching impression, and Kitchens is no less purposeful in leaving the reaches open for most of “Inventing Scapegoats,” taking the placed-far-back vocals buried in the mix of the song prior and putting them as the swirling monasterial fog of the ongoing ritual exploration. Where “Paradise of Fools” was only missing drums to give a full-band feel — accomplishing a Megaton Leviathan-style avant drone-gaze in the meantime — “Inventing Scapegoats” is much quieter, to a point of minimalism early on, but does tip over to manifesting that full-band feel.
That in itself isn’t necessarily new. Kitchens had guitar/bass/drum solo arrangements on 2023’s The Mystic Crib (review here), and that rhythm would be part of the ideology even in a drone project for a drummer should be taken as no surprise. It’s the way Kitchens brings drone, psych and a kind of meditative feel together. “A Misleading Sense of Direction” is part of it in terms of setting the atmosphere, and “Paradise of Fools” reminds of Author & Punisher at its noisiest, so I’m not complaining about that either, but in “Inventing Scapegoats” and “Data Corrupter,” the latter of which sounds like it was recorded on a room mic filtered through a ColecoVision, Kitchens realizes something different in heavy psych and drone. It’s not quite drone-gaze, or heavy-gaze or whatever the difference might be between the two, but it draws from that as well as from the likes of Om and, in the case of the latter, its rough sound and samples make it sound all the more like a garage-psych dispatch from the apocalyptic now.
Each piece on The People’s Department of Governmental Checks and Balances — and if you find the implications of the cover art shocking, grow up; even David Brooks is calling for a popular uprising — adds something to the procession of the whole, and the kind of drummer’s-drone point of view can be heard in the jazzy motion of “Trying to Land,” which would seem to bookend with the leadoff, but in terms of Slow Draw making ‘songs,’ with vocals and changes and arrangements and so on, the album is an immediate standout in Kitchens‘ growing catalog. His journey to this point has brought him to a place of what feels like genuine stylistic discovery and a nascent process emerging in a project that has made experimentation a founding principle. I’m curious as hell to know where Kitchens might take Slow Draw from here, and his move toward songwriting is a big part of why.
The album streams in full below. Please enjoy:
The next Slow Draw work arrives April 29th with the new album “The People’s Department of Governmental Checks & Balances”.
IN THE BAND’S OWN WORDS:
“This album is a continuation of the frustration with current times and events as expressed in the recent release ‘Living in a Land of Scarecrows’. Things seem to be going in reverse, and nothing is logical, so, this mess of songs reflects that kind of chaos and frustration.
Since 2017, Mark Kitchens (one third of Stone Machine Electric) has been steadily releasing a series of singles and albums through his solo project Slow Draw. Informed by drone, ambient, psychedelia, and more, Slow Draw creates patient, exploratory soundscapes. At times unsettling, at others peaceful, Kitchens navigates his way through space and noise with unwavering intent.
Posted in Whathaveyou on March 20th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
As the actual governmental checks and balances are willfully eroded if not outright ignored, it’s good to know somebody’s thinking of breaking out the guillotine and returning to a classic solution to the oppressive forces of oligarchy. I’ll probably get put on a government watch list for posting the album cover of Slow Draw‘s The People’s Department of Governmental Checks and Balances — should be a protest sign if it isn’t one; I’d take a shirt if I could get white on black with the words on top (I’m pretty specific these days) — but the sentiment is welcome and it feels like anytime anybody is speaking out in a way more substantive than those Reels videos where some hyper-earnest-but-ultimately-doing-nothing 25-year-old sits down and tells you “this isn’t normal” for 30 seconds until the story cuts off.
There may not be a free press separate from corporate and/or political influence, and accountability may be a myth contigent on nothing more than what apparently until now was a belief in it, but it’s nice knowing you’re not alone while you’re hunkered down in your bunker/living room waiting for the nation to further unravel, daydreaming of an escape you likely won’t be lucky enough to make before you become a “it couldn’t happen here” cautionary tale. Horrors abound. At least the music’s good in this failed, shithole country.
From the PR wire:
Slow Draw – single “Trying to Land” – Ambient soundscapes, lightly steeped in exploratory psych and the meditative drawn-out cadence of drone out April 1st, 2025
Album “The People’s Department of Governmental Checks & Balances” out April 29th
Since 2017, Mark Kitchens (one third of Stone Machine Electric) has been steadily releasing a series of singles and albums through his solo project Slow Draw. Informed by drone, ambient, psychedelia, and more, Slow Draw creates patient, exploratory soundscapes. At times unsettling, at others peaceful, Kitchens navigates his way through space and noise with unwavering intent.
The next Slow Draw work arrives April 29th with the new album “The People’s Department of Governmental Checks & Balances”, led by the first of three singles, “Trying to Land”, out April 1st.
IN THE BAND’S OWN WORDS:
“This album is a continuation of the frustration with current times and events as expressed in the recent release ‘Living in a Land of Scarecrows’. Things seem to be going in reverse, and nothing is logical, so, this mess of songs reflects that kind of chaos and frustration.
The first single, ‘Trying to Land’, is about trying to reign it all in. Can you bring it in nice and smooth, or will it be rough and unpredictable? In this environment, you’ll never know until you are on the ground. Will it be rubble or business as usual?”
Slow Draw – The People’s Department of Governmental Checks & Balances
Single “Trying to Land” out April 1st, 2025 Album out April 29th (Digital, CD, limited run cassettes) Self-released Hurst, Texas
Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 23rd, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Hurst, Texas-based solo experimentalist Mark Kitchens, who operates under the moniker Slow Draw and doubles as drummer/noisemaker in Stone Machine Electric, presents a relevant take on the zeitgeist with the new EP, Living in a Land of Scarecrows. A proverbial song for our times. Samples tell some of the story across the 23-minute track that comprises the entirety of the EP, but not all of it. “If I only had a brain” from The Wizard of Oz precedes a full delve into SunnO)))-esque drone-wail, which is twisted and manipulated. It sounds for a time like Kitchens is shoving the guitar downward, but it settles into a figure that’s riff-adjacent, and unfolds across a first half that manages to shift from that initial cacophony to something more of a slog, the long repetition and pre-midpoint slowdown feeling like a ready stand-in for everyday horrors and/or the disconnection therefrom.
Kitchens references the “current state of things” as his impetus, and as he notes the sonic departure that is “Living in a Land of Scarecrows” — with that as an implied intellectual assessment — the timing is made all the more political by a release set on the US presidential inauguration day, earlier this week. I recognize the possibility that he’s talking about something else entirely. It’s a big universe and anything can happen in it.
And I don’t know about you, but my disassociated ass would rather watch the slow-motion horror of Slow Draw‘s “Living in a Land of Scarecrows” than the news, which I’m working hard to live distantly from. I’ve been paying attention every day since 9/11 and for what? To see my home nation go full-idiot over a crypto-dealing felon selling himself on messianic promises as the second coming of Big Daddy Ronald Reagan? Thanks, but I’m 43 and I know I should be line fight-fight-fight vive la résistance and such, but I just don’t have it in me. The world already sucked and it’s going to get worse whether I take time out of my day to feel bad about it or not. I don’t want to know. I might be done voting as well, with the given options being fascists, democrats, and worse still somehow, fascist democrats.
I could go on for a while here about “things” and their “current state,” and clearly in his own way Kitchens is ready to do likewise. Video follows here. Please enjoy. May we all survive these times and the wanton corruption and cruel hubris of idiots. If you’re fighting the good fight, thanks. The rest of us are better for that.
Again, visual horror awaits. Be ready for it:
Slow Draw, “Living in a Land of Scarecrows” official video
The current state of things generated this output, as it is not what I was initially working on in my current songwriting phase. This was not the next album I anticipated making, but here we are. This one will hopefully cleanse the palette of your mind.
Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 25th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Hurst, Texas-based ambient/psych experimentalist solo-outfit Slow Draw will release The Mystic Crib on Nov. 10. The project of multi-instrumentalist Mark Kitchens, also known for his work on drums in Stone Machine Electric, has issued a handful-plus of full-lengths and singles, etc., over the last six years, but the 11-song/56-minute collection stands out in sound and purpose, Kitchens honing a style that finds root between stonerjazz, mellow desert, acid funk, krautrock, quietpsych and ambient prog, and it’s never quite doing the same thing twice from song to song, even if it wants you to think it is.
Fair enough. As they invariably would be, Earth are a touchstone here, in “The Mystic Crib” (premiering below) and its album-closing companion-piece “Return From the Mystic Crib,” and in the shimmering cymbal splash of “I See Her,” but Slow Draw is too satisfying a project to stick to one kind of weird. “Daily Jacuzzi Weekly” puts some old funk in the keys and some dub in the drums and is still sad — call that a Grails influence, no less for its intangibility — a fitting precursor to the later loopmaking in “Soggy Chips.” “Funeral Kabob” digs with heart into a Brant Bjork-style groove, while “Legitimate Wizard” and “Embroidered Waistcoasts” mark out more psychedelic pathways, the sample-laced “Milk Carton Complex” adding urgency in its guitar turnarounds that one could liken to King Buffalo as well as Sonic Youth (a comparison drawn below). There are far fewer wrong answers when the sound is encompassing.
Whether that’s coming through in the drums and synth of centerpiece “Sons of the Culinary Arts” or the swirling guitar effects of the subsequent “Invisible Entities Stealing Thunder,” Kitchens sets up his pieces as finished works but does not completely depart the impulsiveness that would seem to have sparked their creation in the first place. That might be a guitar line, a keyboard line. But it’s there and it’s usually something, some foundational sound Kitchens chases down until it becomes a song. It’s the guitar on both “I See Her” and “Milk Carton Complex,” but in two different ways. The vague Sgt. Pepper reference happening in the organ or whatever that is on “Embroidered Waistcoats.” Slow Draw‘s experiments are not unconsidered, or un-built — very pointedly, these are songs with identities derived from their respective sounds — but they have that underlying aspect just the same.
One might argue that makes Slow Draw less predictable, and I’d agree with that, but that extends outside this standalone release. What Kitchens might do next with the project is anyone’s best guess, but with a stated goal that seems to have been based on atmosphere, The Mystic Crib delivers on that promise in a big way and makes even its shorter cuts feel immersive.
Please enjoy “The Mystic Crib” premiering below, followed by more word from Kitchens and the PR wire:
Slow Draw, “The Mystic Crib” video premiere
For the videos I make, they are usually based on a spur of the moment idea similar to how the music is created. The use of the masks only came up because the Mrs had ordered these for one of her art projects, but she didn’t like the masks once they arrived in the mail. So I decided to paint them all instead of sending them back. I was only going to make a few, but ended up spending a few weeks painting them all. There are about 16 total, but I don’t think all of them made it into the video. I wore a full black-out bodysuit under them to hide behind so that the masks stood out and people wouldn’t get distracted by my beady, squinty eyes or any glare off my head. I hope the “mystic” part comes through in the video, as that was the main purpose.
As for the album The Mystic Crib, I wouldn’t say I had a theme in mind as much as I just wanted the album to set a consistent vibe. That’s also the reason the song, The Mystic Crib, is split into bookend tracks on the album. I want listeners to feel like they enter into the album and it carries them through and then it lets them know the journey has come to an end. Hopefully it is the kind of journey they want to embark on again, or at least use it as background music to a chill evening or something like that. All the songs on this album use titles I’ve been collecting over the years. I have a list of “band names” or album titles that I keep on my phone. So, I just went through the list as I listened back to the recordings and named them with titles that just seemed to fit. Not like I need 50 different bands just because I came up with a cool name. There are a couple that are not from that list, one of them being Daily Jacuzzi Weekly. I saw that on the bottom of one of those letter board signs at a motel and thought it was funny because it made no sense.
Slow Draw departs from the noisy ambient improvised pieces and journeys into The Mystic Crib with a structured vibe described as a mishmash of Sonic Youth with the psychedelic side of The Beatles. There is a distinct tonal setting for this work. It provides an ambient groove meant to for one to lose themselves to, or just to simply have floating in the background to calm the mind as one goes about their day.
Tracklisting: 1. Into the Mystic Crib 2. Funeral Kabob 3. Daily Jacuzzi Weekly 4. I See Her 5. Legitimate Wizard 6. Sons of the Culinary Arts 7. Invisible Entities Stealing Thunder 8. Embroidered Waistcoats 9. Milk Carton Complex 10. Soggy Chips 11. Return From The Mystic Crib
Posted in Questionnaire on May 4th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
The Obelisk Questionnaire is a series of open questions intended to give the answerer an opportunity to explore these ideas and stories from their life as deeply as they choose. Answers can be short or long, and that reveals something in itself, but the most important factor is honesty.
Based on the Proust Questionnaire, the goal over time is to show a diverse range of perspectives as those who take part bring their own points of view to answering the same questions. To see all The Obelisk Questionnaire posts, click here.
Thank you for reading and thanks to all who participate.
The Obelisk Questionnaire: Mark Kitchens of Slow Draw, Stone Machine Electric & Heavy Mash Fest
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How do you define what you do and how did you come to do it?
I’ve always considered myself a noise maker, maybe even an explorer. Since I was a child, I always enjoyed sounds and music. I like to find things sonically in music or in everyday sounds.
Describe your first musical memory.
I can’t remember exactly, but it seemed to involved looking at catalogs and picking out albums. It may have been the whole Columbia House thing or something like that. I remember picking out 8-tracks since we had that style player back at that time. I think I picked out The Best of the Statler Brothers because I thought it was funny the cover had women on it and thought they were the musicians. I was 6 or so years old at the time.
Describe your best musical memory to date.
Seeing Phish in 1998 or so. You’d think I’d remember the year, but I don’t. It was an outdoor concert in Austin, Texas. I ended up leaving my group of friends and got to one side of the soundboard area. I just remember getting lost in the sea of people and just enjoying the music and the back and forth between the crowd and the band. It was a communal type energy, and it was fun and mentally freeing.
When was a time when a firmly held belief was tested?
Nothing comes to mind. I’ve had people test my beliefs in who they are, which is greatly surprising when you thought you knew them. As far as beliefs is general, I try my best to keep those based on experience or first hand knowledge so when something does get tested, I have an easier time accepting it. I don’t want to hold onto something based on what I want it to be if it is not what it is. I hope that makes sense.
Where do you feel artistic progression leads?
Artistic progression leads to many things. For me, most of the time it seems to lead to a refined or more distinct path or art. On the other hand, I have had it take me back to where I started, and it becomes cyclical.
How do you define success?
Being happy with the result of my art and music. For my music, if it makes me listen to it over and over because I have captured some sort of memory or emotion in it, then I have succeeded.
What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?
My wife’s internal organs. Our children were both C-section babies. On my first born when the nurse took the baby out, they had me follow them. As I walked towards them, I looked back at Lynda, and all I saw was them putting her parts and pieces back in. That was surreal and gross at the same time. [Hard relate to this. It’s medieval. — ed.]
Describe something you haven’t created yet that you’d like to create.
I’ve started saving dumb little phrases in my phone that I’d like to eventually run into songs. I’m talking 5-10 second long songs. I could see it being an album of about 20-25 songs, and it might top like 5 minutes of play time. I imagine it would sound more like a ton of shitty jingles than anything else. Maybe I could title it “Songs for the Internet” or something stupid like that.
What do you believe is the most essential function of art?
Communication and community. Almost everything can be considered an artform in some fashion, and that brings people together, or at least within the same vicinity. This creates communities and communities that overlap.
Something non-musical that you’re looking forward to?
Guess there are two things. Looking forward to celebrating 23 years of marriage in the next couple of weeks with the Mrs., and kind of still musical as we’ll be seeing The Cure on our anniversary. That’s her all-time favorite band.
Slow Draw will release Yellow & Gray (review here) on May 7. And amid the joyously weird seven tracks that surround it, “A Heavy Snack” precisely what the title leads you to believe — a 91-second snippet of riff-based heavy rollout nestled into the 24-minute experimentalist whole of the album. Mark Kitchens, who doubles as the drummer of Hurst, Texas, heavy-jam-jazz-psych duo Stone Machine Electric, is no stranger to weird as a sonic concept, and Slow Draw is a vehicle for further exploration. That Yellow & Grayopens with “The Project” via manipulated samples and headphone-unveiled wub-wubs before moving into the live-drums and wistful rainy ’70s keyboards of “Stumble” and the ambient-but-also-still-drummed “Spacethunder” ahead of “A Heavy Snack” should be telling. As with Kitchens‘ past outings under the moniker, as well as his various snippets posted through Slow Draw‘s Instagram page, the idea here is to find a creative whim and see where it leads.
In “A Heavy Snack,” that’s to sonic weight. He acknowledges below some kinship with what the piece might have become — or still might, as one never really knows — as a Stone Machine Electric track, but there’s no question it’s a standout on Yellow & Gray, leading into the spacious guitar and deep-mixed toms and cymbals of “Stranded” and the foreboding jazz bass ‘n’ strum of “Sylvia.” It is in fact the shortest song on the record — “Sylvia” is the longest at a relatively meditative 4:40 — and as the Beck homage “Turntable” leads into closer “A Slow Move,” with a blend of acoustic and electric drone in a manner that recalls Earth‘s Hex era, “A Heavy Snack” would seem to find a two-minute complement in those empty spaces. The two works, similarly titled, are of course working toward different ends, but there’s a kinship just the same in drawing from something atmospheric and creating breadth in a limited amount of time.
One has to wonder if “Sylvia,” “Turntable” and even “Spacethunder” aren’t leading toward Slow Draw finding its way into a drone-jazz open/experimentalist vibe, but one of the album’s — and yeah, at 24 minutes, it’s a full-length — strengths is in its lack of established rules. It keeps you listening because you don’t know where it’s going next or how it’s getting there. And by the time you find out, it’s over.
I can’t claim to get the reference in the video for “A Heavy Snack,” but if you do, please, let me know in the comments. In any case, the clip is hilarious and I hope you enjoy.
Thanks:
Slow Draw, “A Heavy Snack” official video premiere
Mark Kitchens on “A Heavy Snack”:
A Heavy Snack is really just a morsel of the song it could be, and if it was performed by Stone Machine Electric it would easily be ten times longer. Thankfully it is not because this video would not work for that long of a song. For this video, I wanted to pay a little homage to how I spent my childhood – watching MTV non-stop and absorbing all the music I could. If you can figure out where my shitty rip-off is taken from, then you probably know about how old I am if the MTV reference didn’t tell you.
Slow Draw is an apt descriptor for its own relaxed presence. This project provides ambient soundscapes, lightly steeped in exploratory psych and the meditative drawn-out cadence of drone.
Friday morning and the Spring 2021 Quarterly Review draws to a close. It’s been a good one, and though there are probably enough albums on my desktop to make it go another few days, better to quit while I’m ahead in terms of not-being-so-tired-I’m-angry-at-everything-I’m-hearing. In any case, as always, I hope you found something here you enjoy. I have been pleasantly surprised on more than a few occasions, especially by debuts.
We wrap with more cool stuff today and since I’m on borrowed time as it is, let me not delay.
Quarterly Review #41-50:
Sonic Flower, Rides Again
Like Church of Misery‘s groove but feel kind of icky with all those songs about serial killers? Legit. Say hello to Tatsu Mikami‘s Sonic Flower. Once upon a 2003, the band brought all the boogie and none of the slaughter of Tatsu‘s now-legendary Sabbathian doom rock outfit to a self-titled debut (reissue review here), and Rides Again is the lost follow-up from 2005, unearthed like so many of the early ’70s forsaken classics that clearly inspired it. With covers of The Meters and Graham Central Station, Sonic Flower makes their funky intentions plain as day, and the blowout drums and full-on fuzz they bring to those cuts as well as the five originals on the short-but-satisfying 28-minute offering is a win academically and for casual fans alike. You ain’t gonna hear “Jungle Cruise” or their take on “Earthquake” and come out complaining, is what I’m saying. This is the kind of record that makes you buy more records.
With Viscera, Copenhagen’s Demon Head make their debut on Metal Blade Records. It is their fourth album overall, the follow-up to 2019’s Hellfire Ocean Void (review here), and it continues the five-piece’s enduring exploration of darker places. Dramatic vocals recount grim narratives over backing instrumentals that are less doom at the outset with “Tooth and Nail” and “The Feline Smile” than goth, and atmospheric pieces like “Arrows” and “The Lupine Choir” and “A Long, Groaning Descent” and “Wreath” and certainly the closer “The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony” further the impression that Viscera, though its title conjures raw guts, is instead an elaborate entirety — if perhaps one of raw guts — and meant to be taken in its 36-minute whole. Demon Head make that LP-friendly runtime a progression down into reaches they’d not until this point gone, tapping sadness for its inherent beauty.
Next time someone asks you what the future sounds like, you’ll have a good answer for them. Combined into a six-piece band, Brazilian outfits Rakta and Deafkids harness ambience and space-punk thrust into a sound that is born of a past that hasn’t yet happened. Their Live at Sesc Pompeia LP follows on from a 2019 two-songer, but it’s in the live performance that the spirit of this unity really shines through, and from opener/longest track (immediate points) “Miragem” through the semi-industrialized effects swirl of “Templo do Caos,” into the blower-noise dance party “Sigilo,” the weirdo-chug-jam of “Forma” and the space rock breakout “Flor de Pele” and the percussed buzz and echoing howls of “Espirais,” they are equal parts encompassing and singular. It is not to be ignored, and though there are moments that border on unlistenable, you can hear from the wailing crowd at the end that to be in that room was to witness something special. As a document of that, Live at Sesc Pompeia feels like history in the making.
A madcap, weighted-but-anti-genre sensibility comes to life in supernova-experimentalist fashion throughout the four songs of Timo Ellis‘ Death is Everywhere. The lockdown-era EP from Ellis (Netherlands, Yoko Ono, Cibo Matto, on and on) makes post-modern shenanigans out of apocalypses inner and outer, and from lines like “this bridal shower is bumming me out” in the unabashedly hooky “Vampire Rodeo” to “the earth will still breathe fire without you!” in “Left Without an Answer,” the stakes are high despite the flittering-in-appreciation-of-the-absurd mood of the tracks themselves. The title-track and “Evolve or Die” blend sonic heft and the experimental pop movement that “Vampire Rodeo” sets forth — the third cut is positively manic and maniacally positive — while “Left Without an Answer” almost can’t help but be consuming as it rolls into a long fade leaving intertwining vocals lines as the last to go, telling the listener to “learn to say goodbye” without making it easy. Won’t be for everyone, doesn’t want to be. Is expression for itself. Feels genuine in that, and admirable.
With not-at-all-subtle nods to Humble Pie and Ennio Morricone in its opening tracks, Heavy Feather‘s second LP, Mountain of Sugar, has boogie to spare. No time is wasted on the 38-minute/11-track follow-up to 2019’s Débris & Rubble (review here), and true to the record’s title, it’s pretty sweet. The collection pits retro mindset against modern fullness in its harmonica-laced, duly-fuzzed title-track, and goes full-Fleetwood on “Come We Can Go” heading into a side B that brings a highlight in the soft-touch-stomp of “Rubble and Debris” and an earned bit of Southern-styled turn in “Sometimes I Feel” that makes a fitting companion to all the bluesy vibes throughout, particularly those of the mellow “Let it Shine” earlier. The Stockholm outfit knew what they were doing last time out too, but you can hear their process being refined throughout Mountain of Sugar, and even its most purposefully familiar aspects come across with a sense of will and playfulness.
Don’t tell him I told you so, but Slow Draw is starting to sound an awful lot like a band. What began as a drone/soundscaping project from Stone Machine Electric drummer/noisemaker Mark Kitchens has sprouted percussive roots of its own on Yellow & Gray, and as Kitchens explores textures of psychedelic funk, mellow heavy and even a bit of ’70s proggy homage in “Sylvia” ahead of the readily Beck-ian jam “Turntable” and acousti-drone closer “A Slow Move,” the band-vibe is rampant. I’m going to call Yellow & Gray a full-length despite the fact that it’s 24 minutes long because its eight songs inhabit so many different spaces between them, but however you want to tag it, it demonstrates the burgeoning depth of Kitchens‘ project and how it’s grown in perhaps unanticipated ways. If this is what he’s been doing in isolation — as much as Texas ever shuttered for the pandemic — his time has not been wasted.
Freak! Out! The 66-minute Nuclear Candy Bar from Hungarian psychedelicists Pilot Voyager might end mostly drifting with the 27-minute “23:61,” but much of the four tracks prior to that finale are fuzz-on-go-go-go-out-out-out heavy jams, full in tone and improv spirit however planned their course may or may not actually be. To say the least, “Fuzziness” lives up to its name, as guitarist/founder Ákos Karancz — joined by bassist Bence Ambrus (who also mastered) and drummers Krisztián Megyeri and István Baumgartner (the latter only on the closer) — uses a relatively earthbound chug as a launchpad for further space/krautrocking bliss, culminating in a scorching cacophony that’s the shortest piece on the record at just under seven minutes. If you make it past the molten heat of the penultimate title-track, there’s no turning away from “23:61,” as the first minute of that next day pulls you in from the outset, a full-length flow all unto itself. More more more, yes yes yes. Alright you get the point.
Sit with The Ginger Faye Bakers‘ Camaro EP for a little bit. Don’t just listen to the first track, or even the second, third or fourth, on their own, but take a few minutes to put it all together. Won’t take long, the thing’s only 17 minutes long, and in so doing you’ll emerge with a more complex picture of who they are as a band. Yeah, you hear the opening title-cut and think early-Queens of the Stone Age-style desert riffing, maybe with a touch of we’re-actually-from-the-Northeast tonal thickness, but the garage-heavy of “The Creeps” feels self-aware in its Uncle Acid-style swing, and as the trio move through the swinging “The Master” and “Satan’s Helpers,” the last song drawing effectively from all sides, the totality of the release becomes all the more sinister for the relatively straight-ahead beginning just a short time earlier. Might be a listen or two before it sinks in, but they’ve found a niche for themselves here and one hopes they continue to follow where their impulses lead them.
If you’re not yet keeping an eye on Regain Records offshoot Helter Skelter Productions, Rome’s Neromega are a fervent argument for doing so. The initials-only cultish five-piece are Italian as much in their style of doom as they are in geography, and across their four-song Nero Omega debut EP, they run horror organ and classic heavy rock grooves alongside each other while nodding subtly at more extreme fare like the death ‘n’ roll rumble in closer “Un Posto” or the dirt-coated low end that caps “Pugnale Ardore,” the drifting psych only moments ago quickly forgotten in favor of renewed shuffle. Eight-minute opener “Solitudine,” might be the highlight as well as the longest inclusion on the 24-minute first-showing, but it’s by no means the sum total of what the band have on offer, as they saunter through giallo, psychedelia, doom, heavy riffs and who knows what else to come, they strike an immediately individual atmospheric presence even while actively toying with familiar sounds. The EP is cohesive enough to make me wonder what their initials are.
Some of the made-even-bigger-by-echo vocals from guitarist Craig Kasamis might remind of Maurice Bryan Giles from Red Fang, but Ventura, California’s Tung are up chasing down a different kind of party on 2020’s Bleak, though Kasamis, guitarist David Briceno (since replaced by Bill Bensen), bassist Nick Minasian and drummer Rob Dean have a strong current of West Coast noise rock in what they’re doing as well in “Runaway,” a lurcher like “Spit” later on or the run-till-it-crashes finisher “Fallen Crown,” which the only song apart from the bookending opener “Succession Hand” to have a title longer than a single word. Still, Tung have their own, less pop-minded take on brashness, and this debut album leaves the bruises behind to demonstrate its born-from-hardcore lineage. Their according lack of frills makes Bleak all the more effective at getting its point across, and while they’d probably tell you their sound is nothing fancy, it’s fancy enough to stomp all over your ears for about half an hour, and that’s as fancy as it needs to be. Easy to dig even in its more aggressive moments.
Posted in Reviews on October 7th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
Day three of the Quarterly Review. Always a landmark. Today we hit the halfway point, but don’t pass it yet since I’ve decided to add the sixth day next Monday. So we’ll get to 30 of the total 60 records, and then be past half through tomorrow. Math was never my strong suit. Come to think of it, I wasn’t much for school all around. Work sucked too.
Anyway, if you haven’t found anything to dig yet — and I hope you have; I think the stuff included has been pretty good so far — you can either go back and look again or keep going. Maybe today’s your day. If not, there’s always tomorrow.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
Hum, Inlet
One has to wonder if, if Hum had it to do over again, they might hold back their first album in 23 years, Inlet, for release sometime when the world isn’t being ravaged by a global pandemic. As it stands, the largesse and melodic wash of the Illinois outfit’s all-growed-up heavy post-rock offers 55 minutes of comfort amid the tumult of the days, and while I won’t profess to having been a fan in the ’90s — their last studio LP was 1997’s Downward is Heavenward, and they sound like they definitely spent some time listening to Pelican since then — the overarching consumption Inlet sets forth in relatively extended tracks like “Desert Rambler” and “The Summoning” and the manner in which the album sets its own backdrop in a floating drone of effects make it an escapist joy. They hold back until closer “Shapeshifter” to go full post-rock, and while there are times at which it can seem unipolar, to listen to the crunching “Step Into You” and “Cloud City” side-by-side unveils more of the scope underlying from the outset of “Waves” onward.
Oslo’s Hymn answer the outright crush and scathe of their 2017 debut, Perish (review here), with a more developed and lethal attack on their four-song/38-minute follow-up, Breach Us. Though they’re the kind of band who make people who’ve never heard Black Cobra wonder how two people can be so heavy — and the record has plenty of that; “Exit Through Fire”‘s sludgeshuggah chugging walks by and waves — it’s the sense of atmosphere that guitarist/bassist/vocalist Ole Rokseth and drummer Markus Støle bring to the proceedings that make them so engrossing. The opening title-track is also the shortest at 6:25, but as Breach Us moves across “Exit Through Fire,” “Crimson” and especially 14-minute closer “Can I Carry You,” it brings forth the sort of ominous dystopian assault that so many tried and failed to harness in the wake of Neurosis‘ Through Silver in Blood. Hymn do that and make it theirs in the process.
Carried across with excruciating grace, Atramentus‘ three-part/44-minute debut album, Stygian, probably belongs in a post-Bell Witch category of extreme, crawling death-doom, but from the script of their logo to the dramatic piano accompanying the lurching riffs, gurgles and choral wails of “Stygian I: From Tumultuous Heavens… (Descended Forth the Ceaseless Darkness)” through the five-minute interlude that is “Stygian II: In Ageless Slumber (As I Dream in the Doleful Embrace of the Howling Black Winds)” and into the 23-minute lurchfest that is “Stygian III: Perennial Voyage (Across the Perpetual Planes of Crying Frost and Steel-Eroding Blizzards)” their ultra-morose procession seems to dig further back for primary inspiration, to acts like Skepticism and even earliest Anathema (at least for that logo), and as guttural and tortured as it is as it devolves toward blackened char in its closer, Stygian‘s stretches of melody provide a contrast that gives some semblance of hope amid all the surrounding despair.
As it clocks in 27 minutes, the inevitable question about Zyclops‘ debut release, Inheritance of Ash, is whether it’s an EP or an LP. For what it’s worth, my bid is for the latter, and to back my case up I’ll cite the flow between each of its four component tracks. The Austin, Texas, post-metallic four-piece save their most virulent chug and deepest tonal weight for the final two cuts, “Wind” and “Ash,” but the stage is well set in “Ghost” and “Rope” as well, and even when one song falls into silence, the next picks up in complementary fashion. Shades of Isis in “Rope,” Swarm of the Lotus in the more intense moments of “Ash,” and an overarching progressive vibe that feels suited to the Pelagic Records oeuvre, one might think of Zyclops as cerebral despite their protestations otherwise, but at the very least, the push and pull at the end of “Wind” and the stretch-out that comes after the churning first half of “Rope” don’t happen by mistake, and a band making these kinds of turns on their first outing isn’t to be ignored. Also, they’re very, very heavy.
It’s all peace and quiet until “Psionic Static” suddenly starts to speed up, and then like the rush into transwarp, Kairon; IRSE!‘s Polysomn finds its bliss by hooking up a cortical node to your left temple and turning your frontal lobe into so much floundering goo, effectively kitchen-sink kraut-ing you into oblivion while gleefully hopping from genre to cosmic genre like they’re being chased by the ghost of space rock past. They’re the ghost of space rock future. While never static, Polysomn does offer some serenity amid all its head-spinning and lobe-melting, be it the hee-hee-now-it’s-trip-hop wash of “An Bat None” or the cinematic vastness that arises in “Altaïr Descends.” Too intelligent to be random noise or just a freakout, the album is nonetheless experimental, and remains committed to that all the way through the shorter “White Flies” and “Polysomn” at the end of the record. You can take it on if you have your EV suit handy, but if you don’t check the intermix ratio, your face is going to blow up. Fair warning. LLAP.
The second 2020 offering from Hurst, Texas’ Slow Draw — the one-man outfit of Mark “Derwooka” Kitchens, also of Stone Machine Electric — the four-song Quiet Joy is obviously consciously named. “Tightropes in Tandem” and closer “Sometimes Experiments Fail” offer a sweet, minimal jazziness, building on the hypnotic backwards psych drone of opener “Unexpected Suspect.” In the two-minute penultimate title-track, Kitchens is barely there, and it is as much an emphasis on the quiet space as that in which the music — a late arriving guitar stands out — might otherwise be taking place. At 18 minutes, it is intended to be a breath taken before reimmersing oneself in the unrelenting chaos that surrounds and swirls, and while it’s short, each piece also has something of its own to offer — even when it’s actively nothing — and Slow Draw brims with purpose across this short release. Sometimes experiments fail, sure. Sometimes they work.
It took all of a week for the married duo of Ana Muhi (vocals, bass) and Sven Missullis (guitars, vocals, drums) to announce Might as their new project following the dissolution of the long-ish-running and far-punkier Deamon’s Child. Might‘s self-titled debut arrives with the significant backing of Exile on Mainstream and earns its place on the label with an atmospheric approach to noise rock that, while it inevitably shares some elements with the preceding band, forays outward into the weight of “Possession” and the acoustic-into-crush “Warlight” and the crush-into-ambience “Flight of Fancy” and the ambience-into-ambience “Mrs. Poise” and so on. From the beginning in “Intoduce Yourself” and the rushing “Pollution of Mind,” it’s clear the recorded-in-quarantine 35-minute/nine-song outing is going to go where it wants to, Muhi and Missullis sharing vocals and urging the listener deeper into doesn’t-quite-sound-like-anything-else post-fuzz heavy rock and sludge. A fun game: try to predict where it’s going, and be wrong.
Following a stint on Metal Blade and self-releasing 2018’s What Was and What Shall Be, West Virginia’s Brimstone Coven issue their second album as a three-piece through Ripple Music, calling to mind a more classic-minded Apostle of Solitude on the finale “Song of Whippoorwill” and finding a balance all the while between keeping their progressions moving forward and establishing a melancholy atmosphere. Some elements feel drawn from the Maryland school of doom — opener the melody and hook of “The Inferno” remind of defunct purveyors Beelzefuzz — but what comes through clearest in these songs is that guitarist/vocalist Corey Roth, bassist/vocalist Andrew D’Cagna and drummer Dave Trik have found their way forward after paring down from a four-piece following 2016’s Black Magic (review here) and the initial steps the last album took. They sound ready for whatever the growth of their craft might bring and execute songs like “When the World is Gone” and the more swinging “Secrets of the Earth” with the utmost class.
Take the brutal industrial doom of Author and Punisher and smash it together — presumably in some kind of stainless-steel semi-automated contraption — with the skin-peeling atmosphere and grueling tension of Khanate and you may begin to understand where All Are to Return are coming from on their debut self-titled EP. How they make a song like four-minute centerpiece “Bare Life” feel so consuming is beyond me, but I think being so utterly demolishing helps. It’s not just about the plodding electronic beat, either. There’s some of that in opener “Untrusted” and certainly “The Lie of Fellow Men” has a lumber to go with its bass rumble and NIN-sounding-hopeful guitar, but it’s the overwhelming sense of everything being tainted and cruel that comes through in the space the only-19-minutes-long release creates. Even as closer “Bellum Omnium” chips away at the last remaining vestiges of color, it casts a coherent vision of not only aesthetic purpose for the duo, but of the terrible, all-gone-wrong future in which we seem at times to live.
I saved this one for last today as a favor to myself. Originally released in 2016, Los Acidos‘ self-titled debut receives a well-deserved second look on vinyl courtesy of Necio Records, and with it comes 40 minutes of full immersion in glorious Argentinian psicodelia, spacious and ’60s-style on “Al Otro Lado” and full of freaky swing on “Blusas” ahead of the almost-shoegaze-until-it-explodes-in-sunshine float of “Perfume Fantasma.” “Paseo” and the penultimate “Espejos” careen with greater intensity, but from the folksy feel that arrives to coincide with the cymbal-crashing roll of “Excentricidad” in its second half to the final boogie payoff in “Empatía de Cristal,” the 10-song outing is a joy waiting to be experienced. You’re experienced, right? Have you ever been? Either way, the important thing is that the voyage that, indeed, begins with “Viaje” is worth your time in melody, in craft, in its arrangements, in presence and in the soul that comes through from front to back. The four-piece had a single out in late 2019, but anytime they want to get to work on a follow-up LP, I’ll be waiting.
meantime — “Inventing Scapegoats” is much quieter, to a point of minimalism early on, but does tip over to manifesting that full-band feel.
