Posted in Whathaveyou on March 16th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Currently embroiled in not-their-first European tour, South African psych-fuzz garage trio The Tazers have a new video out today for a song called “In My Mind” that’s doubling as a herald for their impending Fuzz Machine EP. So when’s that out? I don’t know, soon? “Coming soon?” Let’s figure the three-piece will probably head back to Johannesburg first and then put the EP out sometime thereafter.
At 3:24, the video is an efficient showcase for what The Tazers do well, bringing tonal presence behind what would otherwise be an imbalance between attitude and force of delivery, taking cues from chic turn-of-the-century indie but offering something a bit less purposefully l0-fi with it, a fuller sound. Fuzz Machine will be their follow-up to 2022’s Outer Space (review here) and their fourth outing with ‘machine’ in the title behind 2021’s Dream Machine (review here), 2017’s Love Machine and their 2016 debut, Time Machine. Given all the machinery, one might call their style deceptively organic.
The PR wire has remaining tour dates and info on the new release and video. Have at it:
Psychedelic Rockers The Tazers reveal the video for new single In My Mind
The Tazers has its roots stuck in the 70’s while incorporating modern sounds and structures. This trio pack a high-energy performance that captivates their audience with fuzz tones, vocal harmonies and powerful drum rolls.
In My Mind is the first single from the forthcoming Fuzz Machine EP. Written during the band’s first European tour in 2022 it ushers in a bold punk rock influence for the band. “It’s a song about global issues, with relation to how your mind receives information & how it’s all in your head at the end of the day” says Jethro Lock, lead singer of the band.
On Fuzz Machine the band tackle heavy world issues and In My Mind juxtaposes this with a feel good, carefree attitude. “It’s easy to get wrapped up in the news but sometimes you have to take a moment to enjoy yourself.” The Tazers took on a wide array of influences to bolster the pure energy needed to back up the lyrics and balance the message with delivery.
After their successful first European tour in spring 2022, they will be returning to Europe, touring through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic throughout March.
Remaining European tour dates: 16.03. Rock Pub Moskva / BILINA, CZ 17.03. Harmonie / BONN, DE 18.03. 7180 Bar / CRAILSHEIM, DE 22.03. Frischzelle / DARMSTADT, DE 23.03. DB’s / UTRECHT, NL 24.03. Supersonic / PARIS, FR 27.03. Ebrietas Bar / ZURICH, CH 28.03. Cafe Galao / STUTTGART, DE 29.03. Kulturbrücken / MANNHEIM, DE 31.03. Bahnhof / BAD KÖTZTING, DE 01.04. B72 / WIEN, AT
The current trio consists of Jethro Lock (guitar, vocals), Timothy Edwards (drums, vocals) and Werner Jordaan (bass, vocals).
Oh we’re in the thick of it now, make no mistake. Day one? A novelty. Day two? I don’t know, slightly less of a novelty? But by the time you get to day three in a Quarterly Review, you know how far you’ve come and how far you still have to go. In this particular case, building toward 100 records total covered, today passes the line of the first quarter done, and that’s not nothing, even if there’s a hell of a lot more on the way.
That said, let’s not waste time we don’t have. I hope you find something killer in here, because I already have.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
My Diligence, The Matter, Form and Power
The Matter, Form and Power is the third long-player from Brussels’ My Diligence, whose expansive take on melodic noise rock has never sounded grander. The largesse of songs like the Floor-esque “Multiversal Tree” or the choruses in “On the Wire” and the layered post-hardcore screams in “Sail to the Red Light” — to say nothing of the massive nod with which the title-track opens, or the progressively-minded lumbering with which the 10-minute “Elasmotherium” closes — brims with purpose in laying the atmospheric foundation from which the material soars outward. With “Celestial Kingdom” as its centerpiece, the heavy starting far, far away and shifting into an earliest-Mastodon chug as drift and heft collide, there are hints of Cave In in form if not all through the execution — that is, My Diligence cross similar boundaries but don’t necessarily sound the same — such that the growling that populates that song’s second half isn’t so much a surprise as it is a slamming, consuming, welcome advent. Music as a force. As much volume as you can give it, give it.
Their moniker derived from the initials of the three members — bassist/vocalist/synthesist Pietro Brunetti, guitarist/vocalist Claudio Banelli and drummer Carlo Forgiarini — Italian troupe BBF aren’t through I Will Be Found‘s five minute opener “Freedom” before they’ve transposed grunge vibes onto a go-where-it-wants psychedelia from out of an acoustic, bluesy beginning. Garage rock in “Cosmic Surgery,” meditative jamming in “Rise,” and a vast expanse in “T-Rex” that delivers the album’s title line while furthering with even-the-drums-have-echo breadth the psych vibe such that the synthy take of the penultimate “Wake Up” becomes just another part of the procession, its floating guitar met with percussion real and imagined ahead of the bookending acoustic-based closer “Supernova,” which dedicates its last 90 seconds or so to a hidden track comprised entirely of sweet acoustic notes that might’ve otherwise ended up as an interlude but work just as well tucked away as they are. Here’s a band who know the rules and seem to take a special joy in bending if not outright breaking them, drawing from various styles in order to make their songs their own. To say they acquit themselves well in doing so is an understatement.
Progressive and melodic, the fourth album from Iowan trio Druids is nonetheless at times crushingly heavy, and in a longer piece like “Ide’s Koan,” the band demonstrate how to execute a patient, dynamic build, beginning slow and spaced out and gradually growing in intensity until they reach a multi-layered shouting apex. Drew Rauch (bass), Luke Rauch (guitar) and Keith Rich (drums) all contribute vocals at one point or another, and whether it’s in the plodding rock of “Dance of Skulls” or the not-the-longest-track-but-the-farthest-reaching closer “Cloak/Nior Bloom,” their modern prog metal works off influences like Baroness, Mastodon, Gojira, etc., while retaining character of its own through both rhythmic intricacy and its abiding use of melody, both well on display in “Othenian Blood” and the subsequent, drum-intensive “Traveller” alike. “Path to R” starts Shadow Work mellow after the ceremonial build-up of “Aether,” but the tension is almost immediate and Druids‘ telegraphing that the heavy is coming makes it no less satisfying when it lands.
Though it’s spread across two LPs, don’t think of Kandodo4‘s Burning the (Kandl) as an album. Or even a live album, though technically it’s that. You might not know, you might not care, but it’s a historical preservation. ‘The time that thing happened,’ where the thing is Simon Price of The Heads leading a jam under the banner of his Kandodo side-project featuring Robert Hampson of Loop, and bassist Hugo Morgan and drummer Wayne Maskell — who play in both The Heads and Loop — as part of The Heads‘ residency at Roadburn Festival 2015 (review here). I tell you, I was there, and I’ve seen few psychedelic rituals that could compare in flow or letting the music find its own shape(lessness) as it will. Burning the (Kandl) not only has the live set, but the lone rehearsal that the one-off-four-piece did prior to taking stage at Het Patronaat in Tilburg, the Netherlands, that evening. Thus, history. Certainly for the fest, for the players and those who were there, but I like to think in listening to these side-long stretches of expanse upon expanse that all of our great-grandchildren will worship at the altar of this stuff in a better world. Maybe, maybe not, but better to have Burning the (Kandl) ready to go just in case.
The second EP in about nine months from Los Angeles’ Spencer Robinson — operating under the moniker of Into the Valley of Death — the seven-song Ruthless feels very much like a debut album despite a runtime circa 25 minutes. The songs are cohesive in bringing together doom and grunge as they do, and as with the prior Space Age, the lo-fi aspects of the recording become part of the overarching character of the material. Guitars are up, bass is up, drums are likely programmed, vocals are throaty and obscure at least until they declare you dead on “Ghost,” and the pieces running in the three-to-four-minute range have a kind of languid drawl about them that sound purely stoned even as they seem to reach out into the desert after which the project is seemingly named. Robinson, who also played bass in The Lords of Altamont and has another outfit wherein he fronts a full backing band, is up to some curious shit here, and whether or not it was, it definitely sounds like it was recorded at night. I’m not sure where it’s going, and I’m not sure where it’s been, but I know I’ll look forward to finding out.
Enköping, Sweden’s Stuck in Motion issued their 2018 self-titled debut (review here) to due fanfare, and Still Stuck (changed from the working title ‘Ut på Tur,’ which translates, “on tour”) arrives with a brisk reminder why. Jammy in spirit, early singles “Höjdpunkternas Land,” “Lucy” and “På Väg” brim with vitality and a refreshing take on classic heavy rock, not strictly retro, not strictly not, and all the more able to jam and offer breadth around traditional structures as in “I de Blå” for that, weaving their way into and out of instrumental sections with a jazzy conversation between guitars and keys, bass and drums, percussion, and so on. Combined with the melodies of “Tupida,” the heavier tone underlying “Fisken” and the organ-and-synth-laced shuffle of the penultimate “Tung Sol,” there’s a balance between psych and prog — and, on the closing title-track, horns — which are emblematic of an organic style that couldn’t be faked even if the band wanted to try. I don’t know the exact release date for Still Stuck — I thought it was already out when I slated this review — but its eight songs and 40 minutes are like the kind of afternoon you don’t want to end. Sunshine and impossible blue sky.
A blurb posted by Spanish instrumentalists Sageness — also written SageNESS — with the release of Tr3s reads as follows: “The future seen from the past, where another current reality is possible, follow us and we will transfer to a new dimension. (Tr3s),” and fair enough. One could hardly begrudge the trio a bit of escapism in their work, and listening to the 36 minutes across four songs that comprises Tr3s, they do seem to be finding their way into the ‘way out.’ Though if where they’re ending up is 12-minute finale “Event Horizon,” in which the very jam itself seems to be taffy-pulled on a molecular level until the solid bassline and drums dissipate and what takes hold is a freakout of propulsive, drift-toned guitar, I’m not sure if they do or don’t ultimately make it to another dimension. Maybe that’s on the other side? Either way, after the scope of “Greenhouse” and the more plotted-seeming stops of “Spirit Machine,” that end is somewhat inevitable, and we may be stuck in reality for real life, but Sageness‘ fuzzy and warm-toned heavy psychedelic rock makes a reasoned argument for daydreaming the opposite.
You think you’re up for Kaleidobolt, and that’s adorable, but let’s be honest. The Finnish trio — whose head-spinning, too-odd-not-to-be-prog heavy rock makes This One Simple Trick laughable as a title — are on another level. You and me? They’re running circles around us in “Fantastic Corps” and letting the truth about humans be known amid the fuzz of “Ultraviolent Chimpanzee” after the alternately frenetic and spaced “Borded Control,” momentarily stopping their helicopter twirl to “Walk on Grapes” at the album’s finish, but even then they’re walking on grapes on another planet yet to be catalogued by known science. 2019’s Bitter (review here) boasted likewise self-awareness, but This One Simple Trick is a bolder step into their individuality of purpose, and rest assured, they found it. I don’t know if they’re a “best kept secret” or just underrated. However you say it, more people should be aware. Onto the list of 2022’s best albums it goes, and if there are any simple tricks involved here, I’d love to know what they are.
It probably wouldn’t fit on a 7″, but The Tazers‘ Outer Space EP isn’t much over that limit at four songs and 13 minutes. The Johannesburg trio’s melodicism is striking nearly at the outset of the opening title-track, and the fuzz guitar that coincides is no less right on as they touch on psychedelia without ever ranging so much as to lose sight of the structures at work. “Glass Ceiling” boasts a garage-rocking urgency but is nonetheless not an all-out sprint in its delivery, and “Ready to Die” hits into Queens of the Stone Age-esque rush after an acoustic opening and before its fuzzy rampage of a chorus, while “Up in the Air” is a little more psych-funk until solidifying around the repeated lines, “Give me a reason/Show me a sign,” which culminate as the EP’s final plea, like Witch played at 45RPM or your favorite stoner band’s cooler cousin. Four songs, it probably took more effort to put together than they’d like you to think, but the casual cool they ooze is as infectious as the songs themselves.
Bong-worship sludge from London. It’s hard to know the extent to which Obelos — which for some reason my fingers have trouble typing correctly — are just fucking around, but their dank, lurching riffs, throaty screams and slow-motion crashes certainly paint a picture anyhow. Paint it green, with maybe some little orange or purple flecks in there. Interludes “Paranoise” and “Holy Smokes” bring harsh noise and a kind of improvised-feeling, also-quite-noisy chicanery, but the primary impression in Green Giant‘s six tracks/27 time-bending minutes is of nodding, couchlocked stoner crush, and I wouldn’t dare ask anything more of it than that. Neither should you. I’d argue this is an album rather than the EP it’s categorized as being, since it flows and definitely gets its point across in a full-length manner, but I’m not even gonna fight the band on that because they might break out a 50-minute record or some shit and, well, I’m just not sure I’m ready to get that high this early in the morning. Might have to reserve an entire day for that. Which might be fun, too.
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.
