Posted in Questionnaire on December 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: Anthony Gaglia of LáGoon, Oopsy Dazey & The Crooked Whispers
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How do you define what you do and how did you come to do it?
I just have fun creating music on my own and with my friends. I’ve been playing guitar since I was really young, but for the first chunk of my guitar playing years I was playing classical guitar and did so all the way through college. I still love playing classical guitar, but I got pretty burnt out on how strict it all felt. My only goal now is to make music that I enjoy and more importantly fun to play live.
Describe your first musical memory.
Cruising around in my dad’s work van listening to music. He had a huge tape collection and he’d pick me up from school and let me pick out a tape and we’d drive around and listen to whatever I picked out as loud as the van speakers would allow. More days than not I’d pick ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres. He gave that tape collection to me a few years back.
-Describe your best musical memory to date.
Man, hard to pick just one. I’ve met so many rad people and travelled to some pretty cool places doing this music thing. In college I composed a classical piece based on Haitian voodoo rhythms and traveled to Doha, Qatar to present it at the World Conference of Undergraduate Research which was pretty unreal, so we’ll roll with that one.
When was a time when a firmly held belief was tested?
When I was going to music school and getting all types of music theory shoved down my throat I had this formulaic way of going about writing songs. I thought I needed to jam everything I was learning into the music I was making. I was so focused on every song needing to have key and time signature changes, weird chord voicings, or all of the above. It’s a complex you see a lot of music school kids fall into. If you’re familiar with any of the music I’ve released over the past 8 years it’s pretty obvious I’ve moved away from that haha. I still think there’s a time and place for some of that stuff and still like nerding out on music theory but my songwriting now is definitely more of a “less is more” approach.
Where do you feel artistic progression leads?
For me it leads to expanding into other genres. I think that’s true in music, other forms of art, and life in general. If you aren’t trying other things you’re just limiting what you can accomplish.
How do you define success?
Releasing projects that I’m proud of and being the best friend, son, and husband I can be.
What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?
We found an overdosed couple in the bathroom after one of the shows I played in college. It was the first show of mine my now wife ever came to. The guy survived but unfortunately his girlfriend wasn’t able to be resuscitated. It was a pretty heavy scene.
Describe something you haven’t created yet that you’d like to create.
A classical album. I’ve got a few solo, duo, and quartet guitar pieces I’ve composed. Someday I’d like to get those worked out with some other players and record a live performance of them.
What do you believe is the most essential function of art?
Bringing people together and giving them a sense of community they might not have without it.
Something non-musical that you’re looking forward to?
[Click play above to stream ‘Suicidal Castle’ from The Crooked Whispers’ Funeral Blues LP. Album is out April 7 on Ripple Music. Preorders available here (US), here (EU) and here on Bandcamp.]
It is not so terribly long into The Crooked Whispers‘ second album, Funeral Blues — as opposed to Mark Lanegan‘s Blues Funeral; different vibe — before vocalist Anthony Gaglia delivers the lead-in line near the end of the opener streaming above: “Welcome to the suicide castle,” and that’s one of a few lyrics spread throughout from which the general point of view of the record might be extrapolated. See also: “You can’t escape from funeral blues,” in “Funeral Blues,” “Once you’ve seen both sides of life you’ll beg for death,” in “When Nothing is Left,” and, “Your god’s full of shit,” in the penultimate “Pleasant Death.” Especially as gurgled in the harsh, throaty sludge-scream delivery that populates most of the eight-song/41-minute procession, these lines tell you much about the bitter misanthropy at root in where The Crooked Whispers are coming from as they follow-up their widely-lauded 2020 debut, Satanic Melodies (review here).
As one might expect, there have been some changes in the band since 2020. The multinational four-piece, with bassist/backing vocalist/keyboardist Ignacio de Tommaso and drummer Nicolás Taranto based in Argentina and Gaglia (also of LáGoon) in Portland, Oregon, bid farewell to their San Francisco contingent with the departure of guitarist Chad Davis after 2021’s Dead Moon Night EP (review here), having signed to Ripple Music at the behest of Rob “Blasko” Nicholson (bassist for Ozzy Osbourne, Drown, Rob Zombie, etc.) and brought in guitarist/keyboardist Federico Ramos (ex-Dragonauta, Avernal) for late 2022’s split with Fulanno, Last Call From Hell! (review here).
They continue forward on this second long-player with de Tommaso helming production — which in this case includes putting together remotely-recorded parts as well as the usual working a board — and mixing and mastering alongside Marcelo Suraniti for a sound that’s full and weighted enough to give a sense of depth but still raw in a way that speaks to the sludge lurching beneath the cultish doom lurch of much of the material.
“Suicidal Castle” gives a whole-album intro for its first minute and a half or so (it’s actually 1:23, but who’s counting?) with a reinterpretation of the bridge to Nirvana‘s “In Bloom” that shifts into the first decisive roll for its verse, Gaglia‘s throaty rasp possessing character and bite in kind. It’s not a metal scream, but harsh just the same and rife with fuckall that bleeds into the generally grim atmosphere of what follows as “Stay in Hell” picks up from the quick fade of the leadoff and starts its own march, a cleaner incantation overtop working to establish the range in which much of Funeral Blues will dwell as it wood-handle-knife-carves its niche between crust-sludge, traditional doom, heavy cult rock, and so on, luring the listener further along a bleak course into the aforementioned title-track, which layers backing vocals in its middle third in another, more subtle, shift in approach as the structure likewise turns more linear.
Side A’s four songs are slightly shorter when taken as an entirety than side B’s, but the feeling of being pulled deeper into some shapeless hateful murk is palpable as the six-minute “When Nothing is Left” stands tall to announce its arrival at what is so far the lowest point The Crooked Whispers have gone. Its riff is the master of the dense fog in which the audience lands and resides, the looming peril of being stabbed never too far off as they revel in the extremity at their foundation even as they translate it into a deceptively accessible doomer nod. Side B, meanwhile, is even more down to the business of duggery as “Deathmaker” slams at the start and is quickly into its verse, which is harsh enough to make you want to read up on vocal cord nodules, even as cleaner lines are layered in again; stoned, dead, ugh. Just ugh. Righteously ugh.
Less of a march than its counterpart in “Suicidal Castle,” “Deathmaker” is duly bloodthirsty and malignant, and as the slower “Crippled Shadow” follows — a nadir as regards tempo — the overarchingly wretched spirit is at perhaps its most visceral. If Gaglia was going on about weed, you’d say it sounded like Bongzilla, but The Crooked Whispers are in darker thematic places, exclusively, and the held-out guitar of “Crippled Shadow” at the end of the verse lines past the three-minute mark is no less destructive than the lyrics.
There’s a big crash a minute later, and something of a kick for pace, but by this time, the band have made their intentions clear. Side A dug the whole, side B is where you’re buried alive, and if you want to think of that lurching riff at the finish of “Crippled Shadow” and the noisy cap they give the song as them tossing dirt down by the shovelful, that’s probably fair. It grooves, make no mistake. You can follow a course of riffs from front to back if you want and try and go that way, but these guys aren’t in the habit of making it easy, and many who pit their tolerance for extreme doom and sludge against Funeral Blues will find themselves bested long before the nihilism and churning violence of “Pleasant Death” arrives to put out any remaining vestiges of light.
Not there were any.
That makes the sweep-in guitar and this-is-gonna-be-the-riff-and-we’re-gonna-ride-it broadcasting of intention at the outset of closer and longest track “Bed of Bones” something of a victory lap on the band’s part, but it’s hard to begrudge them the win when what they’ve won at is so willfully disgusting. Murder fantasies persist through a crawler verse, and there’s either a sample or a spoken part as it plods into the midsection, setting up the next verse with a “hail Satan” that really says it all. They move into the last slog with more extreme vocals and a duly horrific organ-laced march that ends on a long fade, as though the one thing they forgot to tell you when they got underway was that the ‘funeral’ in Funeral Blues was going to be yours. Also they’re playing in your blood. That’s probably going to stain.
The Crooked Whispers have a sound that is well and truly fucked. And rather than dig into the genre-standard VHS-era Hammer Films grain, they skip the bullshit and go all-out in their grueling assault, full in tone and threat alike. I’m not saying they’re about to for-real-life wear your face like a mask, etc., but their sound certainly hones in on a fascination with death and Satanic malevolence, and if you think you can get down with that, there might just be a bit of catharsis in Funeral Blues. But if and when you start hearing voices, you might want to consider taking a break. Funeral Blues is multi-level brutality, actively working toward “not for everyone” as a central goal. To be sure, they get there.
If you’re paying attention at all — and fair enough if you’re not — you had to see this one coming, right? No way I wasn’t going to follow up that massive Quarterly Review with a playlist for The Obelisk Show on Gimme Metal. Had to happen. Honestly, I covered enough stuff in that 110-record span that I might do two shows out of it. Have to see what I can pull together for next time.
To answer your next imginary question, yes, it is somewhat bittersweet after two all-Neurosis episodes to be playing anything else. It was bound to happen eventually, some return to normalcy. Such as it is. Fortunately the selections here are killer if I do say so myself, and if you think it’s a coincidence that I reviewed so many albums and this playlist is starting with a cut from the Maha Sohona record, I promise you it is not. That one might’ve been my pick of the whole thing. Also took the excuse to play the Spaceslug track here again, just because it rules and fits that vibe too.
Thanks for listening and/or reading. I hope you enjoy.
The Obelisk Show airs 5PM Eastern today on the Gimme app or at: http://gimmemetal.com
Full playlist:
The Obelisk Show – 07.23.21
Maha Sohona
Leaves
Endless Searcher
The Crooked Whispers
Hail Darkness
Dead Moon Night
Filthy Hippies
I’m Bugging Out
Departures
Paralyzed
Golden Days
Paralyzed
VT
Alastor
The Killer in My Skull
Onwards and Downwards
Spelljammer
Bellwether
Abyssal Trip
Spaceslug
The Event Horizon
The Event Horizon
Los Disidentes del Sucio Motel
Horizon
Polaris
VT
Hellish Form
Shadows with Teeth
Remains
Vouna
Grey Sky
Atropos
Rose City Band
World is Turning
Earth Trip
Moanhand
The Boomerang of Serpents
Present Serpent
VT
Methadone Skies
Retrofuture Caveman
Retrofuture Caveman
The Obelisk Show on Gimme Metal airs every Friday 5PM Eastern, with replays Sunday at 7PM Eastern. Next new episode is Aug. 6 (subject to change). Thanks for listening if you do.
You know what? We’re through the first week of the Quarterly Review as of this post. Not too bad. I feel like it’s been smooth going so far to such a degree that I’m even thinking about adding an 11th day comprised purely of releases that came my way this week and will invariably come in next week too. Crazy, right? Bonus day QR. We’ll see if I get there, but I’m thinking about it. That alone should tell you something.
But let me not get ahead of myself. Day five commence.
Quarterly Review #41-50:
Howling Giant, Alteration
Let the story be that when the pandemic hit, Nashville’s Howling Giant took to the airwaves to provide comfort, character and a bit of ‘home’ — if one thinks of live performance as home — to their audience. With a steady schedule of various live streams on Twitch, some playing music, some playing D&D, the band engaged their listenership in a new and exciting way, finding a rare bright point in one of the darkest years of recent history. Alteration, a crisp four-song/20-minute EP, is born out of those streamed jams, with songs named by the band’s viewers/listeners — kudos to whoever came up with “Luring Alluring Rings” — and, being entirely instrumental from a band growing more and more focused on vocal arrangements, sound more like they’re on their way to being finished than are completely done. However, that’s also the point of the release, essentially to showcase unfinished works in progress that have emerged in a manner that nobody expected. It is another example from last year-plus that proves the persistence of creativity, and is all the more beautiful for that.
Vaguely lysergic, twanging with a non-chestbeating or jingoistic ’70s American singer-songwriter feel, Rose City Band‘s Earth Trip brings sentiment without bitterness in its songs, engaging as the title hints with nature in songs like “Silver Roses,” “In the Rain,” “Lonely Planes,” “Ramblin’ with the Day,” “Rabbit” and “Dawn Patrol.” An outlet for Ripley Johnson, also of Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo, the “band” isn’t so much in Rose City Band, but there is some collaboration — pedal steel here and there, as on “Ramblin’ with the Day” — though it’s very much Johnson‘s own craft and performance at the core of this eight-song set. This is the third Rose City Band long-player in three years, but quickly as it may have come about, the tracks never feel rushed — hushed, if anything — and Johnson effectively casts himself in among the organic throughout the proceedings, making the listener feel nothing if not welcome to join the ramble.
Johannesburg, South Africa’s The Tazers are suited to a short-release format, as their Dream Machine EP shows, bringing together four tracks with psychedelic precociousness and garage rock attitude to spare, with just an edge of classic heavy to keep things grooving. Their latest work opens with its languid and lysergic title-track, which sets up the shove of “Go Away” and the shuffle in “Lonely Road” — both under three and a half minutes long, with nary a wasted second in them, despite sounding purposefully like tossoffs — and the latter skirts the line of coming undone, but doesn’t, of course, but in the meantime sets up the almost proto-New Wave in the early going on “Around Town,” only later to give way to the band’s most engaging melody and a deceptively patient, gentle finish, which considering some of the brashness in the earlier tracks is a surprise. A pleasant one, though, and not the first the three-piece have brought forth by the time they get to the end of Dream Machine‘s ultra-listenable 16-minute run.
Pressed in an ultra-limited edition of 34 tapes (the physical version also has a bonus track), Kavrila‘s Rituals III brings together about 16 minutes of heavy hardcore and post-hardcore, a thickened undertone giving something of a darker mood to the crunch of “Equality” as guitars are layered in subtly in a higher register, feeding into the urgency without competing with the drums or vocals. Opener “Sunday” works at more of a rush while “Longing” has more of a lurch at least to its outset before gradually elbowing its way into a more careening groove, but the bridge being built is between sludge and hardcore, and while the four-piece aren’t the first to build it, they do well here. If we’re picking highlights, closer “Elysium” has deft movement, intensity and atmosphere in kind, and still features a vocal rawness that pushes the emotional crux between the verses and choruses to make the transitions that much smoother. The ending fades out early behind those shouts, leaving the vocals stranded, calling out the song’s title into a stark emptiness.
Brutal rebirth. Robin Van Oyen is the lone figure behind Bruges, Belgium-based death-doom outfit Gateway, and Flesh Reborn is his first EP in three years. Marked out with guest guitar solos by M., the four-track/25-minute offering keeps its concentration on atmosphere as much as raw punishment, and while one would be correct to call it ‘extreme’ in its purpose and execution, its deathliest aspects aren’t just the growling vocals or periods of intense blast, but the wash of distortion that lays over the offering as a whole, from “Hel” through “Slumbering Crevasses,” the suitably twisting, later lurching “Rack Crawler” and the grandeur-in-filth 12-minute closing title-track, at which point the fullness of the consumption is revealed at last. Unbridled as it seems, this material is not without purpose and is not haphazard. It is the statement it intends to be, and its depths are shown to be significant as Van Oyen pulls you further down into them with each passing moment, finally leaving you there amid residual drone.
Admirably punk in its dexterity, Bala‘s debut album, Maleza, arrives as a nine-track pummelfest from the Spanish duo of guitarist/vocalist Anx and drummer/vocalist V., thickened with sludgy intent and aggression to spare. The starts and stops of opener “Agitar” provide a noise-rock-style opening that hints at the tonal push to come throughout “Hoy No” — the verse melody of which seems to reinvent The Bangles — while the subsequent “X” reaches into greater breadth, vocals layered effectively as a preface perhaps to the later grunge of “Riuais,” which arrives ahead of the swaggering riff and harsh sneer of “Bessie” the lumbering finale “Una Silva.” Whether brooding in “Quieres Entrar” or explosive in its shove in “Cien Obstaculos,” Maleza offers stage-style energy with clarity of vision and enough chaos to make the anger feel genuine. There’s apparently some hype behind Bala, and fair enough, but this is legitimately one of the best debut albums I’ve heard in 2021.
French prog-fuzz five-piece Tremor Ama make a coherent and engaging debut with Beneath, a first full-length following up a 2017 self-titled EP release. Spacious guitar leads the way through the three-minute intro “Ab Initio” and into the subsequent “Green Fire,” giving a patient launch to the outing, the ensuing four songs of which grow shorter as they go behind that nine-minute “Green Fire” stretch. There’s room for ambience and intensity both in centerpiece “Eclipse,” with vocals echoing out over the building second half, and both “Mirrors” and “Grey” offer their moments of surge as well, the latter tapping into a roll that should have fans of Forming the Void nodding both to the groove and in general approval. Effectively tipping the balance in their sound over the course of the album as a whole, Tremor Ama showcase an all-the-more thoughtful approach in this debut, and at 30 minutes, they still get out well ahead of feeling overly indulgent or losing sight of their overarching mission.
Delivered on multiple formats including as a 12″ vinyl through Regain Records offshoot Helter Skelter Productions, the bleary cultistry of The Crooked Whispers‘ two-songer Dead Moon Night also finds the Los Angeles-based outfit recently picked up by Ripple Music. If it seems everybody wants a piece of The Crooked Whispers, that’s fair enough for the blend of murk, sludge and charred devil worship the foursome offer with “Hail Darkness” and the even more gruesome “Galaxy of Terror,” taking the garage-doom rawness of Uncle Acid and setting against a less Beatlesian backdrop, trading pop hooks for classic doom riffing on the second track, flourishing in its misery as it is. At just 11 minutes long — that’s less than a minute for each inch of the vinyl! — Dead Moon Night is a grim forecast of things to come for the band’s deathly revelry, already showcased too on last year’s debut, Satanic Whispers (review here).
Schooled, oldschool doom rock for denim-clad heads as foggy as the distortion they present, No Stone‘s debut album, Road into the Darkness, sounds like they already got there. The Rosario, Argentina, trio tap into some Uncle Acid-style garage doom vibes on “The Frayed Endings,” but the crash is harder, and the later 10-minute title-track delves deeper into psychedelia and grunge in kind, resulting in an overarching spirit that’s too weird to be anything but individual, however mmuch it might still firmly reside within the tenets of “cult.” If you were the type to chase down a patch, you might want to chase down a No Stone patch, as “Devil Behind” makes its barebones production feel like an aesthetic choice to offset the boogie to come in “Shadow No More,” and from post-intro opener “Bewitched” to the long fade of “The Sky is Burning,” No Stone balance atmosphere and songcraft in such a way as to herald future progress along this morose path. Maybe they are just getting on the road into the darkness, but they seem to be bringing that darkness with them on the way.
Dead Icons is the sixth full-length from Brazilian psychedelic outfit Firefriend, and throughout its 10 songs and 44 minutes, the band proffer marked shoegaze-style chill and a sense of space, fuzzy and molten in “Hexagonal Mess,” more desert-hued in “Spin,” jangly and out for a march on “Ongoing Crash.” “Home or Exile” takes on that question with due reach, and “Waves” caps with organ alongside the languid guitar, but moments like “Tomorrow” are singular and gorgeous, and though “Three Dimensional Sound Glitch” and “666 Fifth Avenue” border on playful, there’s an overarching melancholy to the flow, as engaging as it is. In its longest pieces — “Tomorrow” (6:05) and “One Thousand Miles High” (5:08) — the “extra” time is well spent in extending the trio’s reach, and while it’s safe to assume that six self-recorded LPs later, Firefriend know what they want to do with their sound, that thing feels amorphous, fleeting, transient somehow here, like a moving target. That speaks to ongoing growth, and is just one of Dead Icons‘ many strengths.
Posted in Whathaveyou on April 7th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Based in Los Angeles and Argentina, cultists The Crooked Whispers have inked a deal to release their second album as a part of Rob “Blasko” Nicholson‘s curated series through Ripple Music. Snagging the trio, who released their debut album, Satanic Melodies (review here), in the dead heat of last summer and followed up with the single “Galaxy of Terror” that you can hear below last Fall, will issue their sophomore full-length sometime later this year. They are the latest in a string of strong pickups by Ripple, and as far as Blasko‘s track record goes, dude would seem to be three for three.
I’ll hope to have more to come as we get closer to the release, but here’s the PR wire announcement in the meantime:
THE CROOKED WHISPERS – Ripple Music
L.A. psychedelic doom purveyors THE CROOKED WHISPERS sign to Ripple Music as part of special series curated by Blasko.
Ripple Music welcome satanic psych doom unit THE CROOKED WHISPERS to their ever-expanding roster, for the release of their sophomore album. This comes as the third signing as part of the special series of releases curated by Blasko.
THE CROOKED WHISPERS formed in 2020 during the global pandemic and released their debut studio album ‘Satanic Melodies’ and the ‘Galaxy of Terror / Hail Darkness’ EP through Bandcamp. The “satanic psych doom” trio is made up of musicians hailing from the United States and Argentina: Ignacio De Tommaso (Luciferica) on bass, Anthony Gaglia (LáGoon) handling the vocals and Chad Davis (Hour of 13) on guitar.
Since then, the cult has steadily been growing around the world, sparking the interest of many fans and most notably Ozzy Osbourne bassist Blasko, who has signed them to Ripple Music under his exclusive partnership with the label for their highly anticipated sophomore release.
BLASKO comments on this new signing: “Satanic Melodies is a true cult masterpiece and I reached out to the band immediately expressing my interest in bringing them on to Ripple. I am excited to work with them and assist their efforts into what will undoubtedly be the most terrifying release of the label’s history.”
Stay tuned, as more details about their upcoming new album will be revealed soon!
THE CROOKED WHISPERS is Ignacio De Tommaso — bass Anthony Gaglia — vocals Chad Davis — guitar
Posted in Reviews on October 12th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
Well, the weekend’s over and it’s time to wrap up the Quarterly Review. Rest assured, I wrote the following during my copious weekend leisure time, resting on the side of a heated Olympic-size pool with a beverage nearby. It definitely wasn’t four in the morning on a Sunday or anything. If I haven’t gotten the point across yet, I hope you’ve found something amid this massive swath of records that has resonated with you. By way of a cheap plug, I’ll be featuring audio from a lot of these bands on the Gimme Metal show this Friday, 5PM Eastern, if you’re up for tuning in.
Either way, thanks for reading and for being a part of the whole thing. Let’s wrap it up.
Quarterly Review #51-60:
The Pilgrim, …From the Earth to the Sky and Back
Lest he be accused of laziness, Gabriele Fiori — also of Black Rainbows, Killer Boogie and the head of the Heavy Psych Sounds label, booking agency and festival series — made his solo debut as The Pilgrim with Spring 2019’s Walking into the Forest (review here). Joined by Black Rainbows drummer Filippo Ragazzoni, Fiori ups the scale of the journey with the second The Pilgrim LP, …From the Earth to the Sky and Back. Richer in arrangement, bolder in craft and more confident in performance, the album runs 14 songs and 50 minutes still largely based around an acoustic acid rock foundation, but with a song like “Riding the Horse” tapping ’70s singer-songwriter vibes while “Cuba” touches on Latin percussion and guitar and “Space and Time” journeying out near the record’s end with waves of synthesizer, it seems The Pilgrim isn’t so willing to be pigeonholed. So much the better.
There is an undercurrent of extremity to the debut release from Polymoon, who hail from the psychedelic hotbed that is Tampere, Finland. The six-song/42-minute Caterpillars of Creation turns in opener “Silver Mt.” to fervent guitar push or from freaked-out cosmic prog into drifting post-universe exploration, setting the stage for the dynamic that unfolds throughout. The wash early in the second half of “Lazaward” is glorious, and it’s not the first or the last time Polymoon go to that adrenaline-pumping well, but the serenity that caps that song and seems to continue into “Malamalama” in closing side A is no less effective. “Helicaling” mounts tension in its early drumming but finally releases it later, and “Neitherworld” gives Caterpillars of Creation‘s most fervent thrust while closer “Metempsychosis” rounds out with a fitting sense of dissipation. As a first album/first release, it is particularly stunning, and to make it as plain as possible, I will think less of any list of 2020’s best debut albums that leaves out Polymoon.
The two-piece comprised of Martin Weaver (ex-Wicked Lady) and synthesist Scott “Dr. Space” Heller (Øresund Space Collective, Black Moon Circle, etc.) position First Treatment as their proper studio debut, and it certainly hits its marks in galaxial adventuring well enough to qualify as such, but the duo have been on a creative splurge throughout this year — even in lockdown — and so the six songs here are also born out of the work they’ve been doing since releasing their debut single “Ghouls ‘n’ Shit” (video premiere here) late last year. The album launches with “Journey to Enceladus,” which boasts drum programming by Weaver and though one of the movements in the 21-minute “Into the Oort Cloud” is based around beats, the bulk of First Treatment is purely a work of guitar and synth, and it basks in the freedom that being so untethered inherently brings. Running an hour long, it’s improvisational nature isn’t going to be for everyone, but Heller and Weaver make a strong argument that maybe it should be.
Who’s ready for a New Wave of PNW Fuckery? That’s right folks, the NWOPNWF has arrived and it’s Spokane, Washington’s Merlock leading the sometimes-awfully-punk-sometimes-awfully-metal-but-somehow-also-always-sludge charge. Aggressive and damning in lyrics, swapping between raw screams, grows, shouts and cleaner vocals and unhinged in terms of its genre loyalties, That Which Speaks seems to find the “melt faces” setting wherever it goes, and though there’s a sense of the four-piece feeling out what works best for them stylistically, the sometimes frantic, sometimes willfully awkward transitions — as in second cut “Prolapse” — serve the overall purpose of undercutting predictability. Eight-minute opener/longest track (immediate points) “Idolon” stomps and shoves and gnashes and nasties its way through, and that’s the modus across what follows, though the scream-along headbanger “Vessel” somehow seems even rawer, and though it ends by floating into oblivion, the start of “Condemnation” is heavy fuckin’ metal to me. You never know quite where Merlock are going to hit next, and that’s the joy of the thing. May they remain so cacophonous.
Long-running UK psychedelic rockers Sun Dial — led by founding guitarist/vocalist Gary Ramon — released Mind Control in 2012. Sulatron Records picked it up in 2015, and now, five years after that, the same label presents Mind Control: The Ultimate Edition, a 2CD version of the original LP-plus-bonus-tracks reissue that brings the total runtime of the release to a well-beyond-manageable 98 minutes of lysergic experimentation. A full 20 tracks are included in the comprehensive-feeling offering, and from early mixes to alternative takes and lost tracks, and if this isn’t the ‘ultimate’ version of Mind Control, I’m not sure what could be, notwithstanding a complete-studio-sessions box set. Perhaps as a step toward that, Mind Control: The Ultimate Edition gives an in-depth look at a vastly underappreciated outfit and is obviously put together as much for the label as by it. That is to say, you don’t put out a reissue like this unless you really love the original record, and if Sulatron loving a record isn’t enough endorsement for you, please turn in your mushrooms on your way out the door.
Immersion is the goal of Saturn’s Husk‘s third long-player, The Conduit, and the Riga, Latvia, instrumentalist trio accomplish it quickly with the fluid riffs that emerge from the drone-based intro “Death of Imaginary Lights” and the subsequent 10-minute opener “Black Nebula.” At nine songs and 63 minutes, the album is consuming through the welcome nodder “The Heavenly Ape,” the especially-doomed “The Ritual” and the more mellow-float centerpiece “Spectral Haze,” while “Mycelium Messiah” brings more straight-ahead fuzz (for a time) and drones on either side surround the 10:35 “Sand Barrows,” the latter serving as the finale “A Shattered Visage” quoting Percy Bysshe Shelley and the former “City of the Djinn” running just a minute-plus but still doing enough to reset the brain from where “Mycelium Messiah” left it. Almost functioning as two albums side-by-side with “Spectral Haze” as the dividing point, The Conduit indeed seems to join various sides together, with a depth to coincide that invites the listener to explore along with it.
Landing a punch of classic metal to go along with its heavy-bottomed groove, Diggeth‘s Gringos Galacticos — one supposes the title ‘Spacecrackers’ was taken — was released by the Dutch trio in 2019 and receives a US limited vinyl edition thanks to Qumran Records. One finds some similar guitar heroics to those of Astrosoniq‘s more straightforward moments, but Diggeth‘s focus remains on hookmaking for the duration, offering hints of twang and acoustics in “In the Wake of Giants” and tipping a hat southwestward in “Three Gringos,” but “Straight-Shooter” is willfully breaks out its inner Hetfield and even as the penultimate “Unshackled” departs for a quieter break, it makes its way back in time for the big finish chorus, adding just a touch of Candlemass grandiosity for good measure before the harmonica-laced closing title-track rounds out with its dynamic spacey weirdness, the name of the album repeating itself in an answer to the Stephen Hawking sample that started the voyage on its way.
Cursed Tongue Records has the vinyl here, and Three Moons the tape, and the CD will arrive through Aladeriva Records, La Rubia Producciones, Aneurisma Records, Surnia Records and Violence in the Veins — so yes, Horizon‘s third album, The White Planet Patrol is well backed. Fair enough for the Kyuss-via-Black–Rainbows vibes of “End of Utopia” or the initial charge and flow of “The Backyard” that sets the Alicante, Spain, trio on their way. “King Serpent” and “Death & Teddies” bring well-crafted fuzz to bear, and “Blind World” effectively layers vocals in its chorus to coincide, but the more laid back roll of the title-cut is an unmistakable highlight. Shades of mid-paced Nebula surface in “Meet the Forest” later on, but Horizon are part of a tradition of heavy bands in Alicante and they know it. The smoothness of their tone and delivery speaks volumes on its own in that regard, never mind the actual songwriting, which also leaves nothing to be desired.
Debut EP from Limousine Beach out of Pittsburgh, and if the three guitars involved don’t push it over the top, certainly the vocal harmonies get that particular job done. You got six minutes for three songs? Yeah, obviously. They scorch through “Tiny Hunter” to close out, but it’s in the leadoff title-track that Stealin’ Wine + 2 sees the Dave Wheeler-fronted outfit land its most outrageous chorus, just before they go on to find a middle-ground between KISS and Thin Lizzy on “Hear You Calling.” The harmonies open and are striking from the outset, but it’s in how they’re arranged around the standalone parts from Wheeler (also Outsideinside, ex-Carousel) that the outfit’s truest potential is shown. Issued through Tee Pee Records, Stealin’ Wine + 2 is the kind of thing you’d pick up at a show in a normal year and then feel way ahead of everyone else when the LP finally hits. Not a normal year, obviously, but Limousine Beach are serving due notice just the same. In six minutes, no less.
I’m sure a lot of records show up at Satan’s door with notes, like, “Dear sir, please find the enclosed submitted for your approval,” but it’s not hard to imagine Beelzebub himself getting down with the filth-coated sludge and rolling doom unfurled across The Crooked Whispers‘ debut offering, Satanic Melodies, marked by hateful, near-blackened screams from Anthony Gaglia and the plodding riffs of Chad Davis (Hour of 13, et al). The title-track is longest at 8:23 and in addition to featuring Ignacio De Tommaso‘s right-on bass tone in its midsection, it plays out early like Weedeater sold their collective soul, and drifts out where earlier pieces “Sacrifice” and “Evil Tribute” and “Profane Pleasure” held their roll for the duration. Stretches of clean-vocal cultistry add to the doomier aspects, but The Crooked Whispers seem to care way less about genre than they do about worshiping the devil, and that unshakable faith behind them, the rest seems to fall into place in accordingly biting fashion.
